Twyford Bridge into the shade of the Shawford chestnuts below, one half fancies to be sounding an almost self-conscious note of the fame they have acquired in the past thirty years. For when, nearly half a century ago, the present writer as a diminutive schoolboy at this same Twyford on Itchen--from a home oddly enough on the banks of the Kennet--used to behold his tutor sallying forth on a half holiday with long wobbly rod to cast two wet-flies on these now sacred waters, it is quite certain that few outsiders save an occasional angler ever heard of the Itchen--unless some glimmer from their school-room days reminded them that it was the river upon which Winchester stood. In those days local proprietors up and down the river gave their neighbours a day or two's fishing, no doubt, when they asked for it, as men do to-day upon obscure rivers. And the old-time sportsman, with no sense of a priceless favour conferred, went to work and cast his two wet-flies across and down the swifter streams, and took his chance of cut or uncut weeds and his modest share of trout, pure-blooded lineal descendants of those the monks of Winchester netted for their stew ponds in the days of old. But Heaven knows what might be the ancestry of a modern Itchen trout! Then came the great revolution, the Art of the dry-fly with a big A, which first developed itself on this very Itchen and its neighbour the Test. The elderly angler needs no telling what a revolution was this, breaking the tradition of centuries, and sending its echoes all over the world wherever men angle for trout; changing the method of thousands, upsetting old standards--fruitful, too, of much misunderstanding, of recrimination even, and a good deal of foolishness which still prevails. But the great fact remains that it exalted the chalk stream from a rather dull field for the angler's operations compared to the mountain river, into a valuable heritage ranking almost with the deer forest and the grouse moor. This inevitably brought in its train a certain amount of vulgarity as well as a good deal of pose and affectation, vices from which the honest sport of angling alone had hitherto been absolutely free. In short, it came perilously near to one of those essentials that a would-be sporting parvenu thought he ought to possess. This, however, is a trifle. The chalk-stream trout became all at once an Epicurean of the first degree, and in time such a mixture of selected stocks it would puzzle him to know his own father, handsome fellow though he be. His habits, indeed, have undergone within easy memory an absolute transformation. He will now very often look you steadily in the face for half an hour at close quarters, but when it comes to business will only consider an oiled and floating fly placed above him in thoroughly up-to-date fashion. Most of us really know that he cannot always maintain this high standard that is expected of him--but it is not the thing to say so.