In travelling up the Alresford road on the west banks of the river, past the gates of pleasant residences and the thatched cottages of typical Hampshire hamlets, one might pause under other conditions to make acquaintance with the interesting old churches of Headbournworthy and Itchen Abbas. But, as it is, one would rather, I think, take every opportunity of following the short lanes that at intervals run down from the highway to the meadows and to the banks of the brimming buoyant stream. It is almost as captivating, I think, to watch the gurgling sweep of a chalk stream as the more boisterous humours of her wilder sister of the mountain. The Itchen, having regard merely to the water between its banks, is singularly beautiful. As pellucid as the Wiley, there is a life and movement and rush over the gravel greater even than in that engaging stream, whose surroundings, however, like those of the Upper Avon, are far more natural and characteristic than the slightly conventional atmosphere of the Itchen. But the almost constant stir and the melodious voice of the latter river are infinitely pleasing: singing now over a pebbly bottom whose water-polished stones show varied and almost radiant colours upon a gleaming chalk-bed, now swishing silently over streaming green weeds that in another month will fall beneath the cutter's scythe lest they choke the stream. And as to the fat trout, they are everywhere in evidence, splashing perhaps at the iron blues or olive duns as they fall before the light puffing airs upon the stream's surface, or lying motionless, but for their slightly swaying tails, in mid-current, surfeited with a recent meal, or quietly absorbing such subaqueous morsels and atoms as drift along. How rich, too, in colour are the low green banks whose very rims these brimming chalk streams, even in the dryest season, seem ever to press against, whether in early days before the first May-fly heralds the Itchen's carnival, and the cuckoo-flower and the kingcup star the growing grass; or again, later, when the purple willow-herb blazes behind the waving sedges, and the glorious meadow-sweet, in feathered ivory masses, ladens the fresh moist air that moves above the stir of so many waters. Many, to be sure, of our winged friends that are always with us in the streams of the north and west are absent here. The white-breasted dipper will have nothing to say to chalk streams. The migrant sandpiper from the sea-coasts, with rare exceptions, holds absolutely with the dipper, and hies him away for the breeding season to share with his dark-frocked, white-throated friend and permanent resident there the snugger bank-harbourage of the bosky western torrents. But there are water-fowl here at any rate, if of a less elusive and more clamorous kind; for the osier beds by the chalk streams are strident by day with the various notes and boisterous antics of the breeding moor-hens, and often melodious by night with the song of the reed-warbler.