To fish for him now in the old wet-fly way would be regarded much as the shooting of pheasants rising at your feet, since Mr. Chalk-stream trout is assumed to regard as a positive insult the offer of a fly after the fashion in which the trout of Tweed or Usk like it offered, and as his own ancestors, or at any rate predecessors, used themselves to be content with. This sounds paradoxical. The whole thing, indeed, savours somewhat of contradiction, but not so much so as these over-frank and irreverently enumerated truisms might suggest to the uninitiated. I have, however, seen myself, from the overlooking vantage-point of a highway traversing the Kennet valley, three partners in an angling syndicate well out of sight of one another, flogging a noted dry-fly water down and across with a wet-fly before a light breeze, and probably not without success. It was delightful to the wayfaring angler to watch these furtive and guilty souls, each thinking no eye but that of some unconscious waggoner could peradventure behold their crooked deeds, and safe at least from one another. Alas, weak human nature! It was delicious to think how differently any fish that might take those draggled "chuck-and-chance-it" flies would be killed again in the smoking-room that night. But we are now on the Itchen, and of course such things are never done here. No reader with any sense of humour or proportion will, I presume, look here for a boiled-down treatise on the oldest and historically the most famous city in England next to London. As we left the shyer charms of Salisbury, with its wealth of Mediæval and Tudor architecture, lawn and towers, elms and glistering waters, with its fine flavour of those Trollopian chronicles of Barset which it inspired, to the unaided intelligence of the wanderer by the Avon, so, much more in these brief pages, must we leave alone the kindred but more voluminous subject of Winchester. Unlike Salisbury, however, where the Avon tumbles through the heart of the town before skirting the sacred groves where Mrs. Proudie once reigned, the Itchen only skirts the older city, which lies like Salisbury in the lap of downs. It is near enough, however, to associate itself in the landscape with the great Cathedral, lately in such peril of collapse, with the famous school whose domain actually touches its banks, with the beautiful old fabric of St. Cross and its Norman tower lying in the meadows beyond. The life of the Itchen is singularly short, considering the volume of water and the measure of fame it at once gathers in so brief a space. Twenty minutes in a motor, or forty on a cycle, up its banks from Winchester would bring you to the head of it; for above Alresford, where three streams unite, fortified by many independent springs, the Itchen is hardly worth considering. Down the river again from Winchester, to continue this form of reckoning, about the same expenditure of time would bring you to Bishopstoke, after