hint from a homing badger that it was time to be ensconced, returned to the valley, and hid amongst the rushes bordering the mill-pool, at a spot almost midway between the inflow and the hatch. He had hardly settled down when the otter and her cubs hurried by along the opposite bank, on their way to a reedy marsh a mile above. Then all was quiet till, at peep of day, a kingfisher came and fished from a branch of the alder overhanging the inflow; the tinkle of the water as she struck it made a pretty sound in the silent dawn. Later, just as the smoke rose from the miller’s chimney, a moorhen led out her brood as if to teach them the geography of the pool, for she kept taking them from creeklet to creeklet till the miller came to raise the hatch and drove them all away. The hum of the water-wheel brought back to the leveret’s memory the swarm of bees and the unforgettable din of the reapers; but if he looked for the invasion of his new quarters by a posse of men and boys he must have been agreeably disappointed when, early in the forenoon, there came only a solitary angler, whose entry was so noiseless as scarcely to disturb the peace of the quiet spot. Indeed the newcomer stood for a second or two surveying the pool from the opening between the withies before the leveret was aware of his presence. On the discovery the timid creature thought, naturally enough, that the pair of restless black eyes were scanning the bank in search of him; he did not know they were drawn now here, now there, by the rising trout. The angler was a tall, spare man of aquiline features, attired in grey tweed suit and wearing a dove-coloured top-hat, about which some fly-casts were neatly wound. His upright figure, thick black curly hair, in which the few grey hairs seemed out of place, above all the comeliness of face, marked him as a man between thirty and forty years of age. So one would have judged as he stood, though the ease with which he leapt the ditch to the sedges spoke rather of twenty-five.