dead; he can't be. He has more lives than a cat, and if you know anything of him, you ought to know that."

"I have good reason to know it, none more: but—"

"But, sir! But what? Harm come to him, sir? The Lord wouldn't harm him for his father's sake; and as for the devil!—I tell you, sir, if he tried to fly away with him, he'd have to drop him before he'd gone a mile!" And Mark began blowing his nose violently, and getting so red that he seemed on the point of going into a fit.

"Tell you what it is, gentlemen," said he at last, "you come and stay with me, and see his father. It will comfort the old man—and—and comfort me too; for I get down-hearted about him at times."

"Strange attraction there was about that man," says Stangrave, sotto voce to Claude.

"He was like a son to him—"

"Now, gentlemen. Mr. Mellot, you don't hunt?"

"No, thank you," said Claude.

"Mr. Stangrave does, I'll warrant."

"I have at various times, both in England and in Virginia."

"Ah! Do they keep up the real sport there, eh? Well that's the best thing I've heard of them, sir!—My horses are yours!—A friend of that boy, sir, is welcome to lame the whole lot, and I won't grumble. Three days a week, sir. Breakfast at eight, dinner at 5.30—none of your late London hours for me, sir; and after it the best bottle of port, though I say it, short of my friend S——'s, at Reading."

"You must accept," whispered Claude, "or he will be angry."

So Stangrave accepted; and all the more readily because he wanted to hear from the good banker many things about the lost Tom Thurnall.

* * * * *

"Here we are," cries Mark. "Now, you must excuse me: see to yourselves. I see to the puppies. Dinner at 5.30, mind! Come along, Goodman, boy!"

"Is this Whitbury?" asks Stangrave.

It was Whitbury, indeed. Pleasant old town, which slopes down the hill-side to the old church,—just "restored," though by Lords Minchampstead and Vieuxbois, not without Mark Armsworth's help, to its ancient beauty of grey flint and white clunch chequer-work, and quaint wooden spire. Pleasant churchyard round it, where the dead lie looking up to the bright southern sun, among huge black yews, upon their knoll of white chalk above the ancient stream. Pleasant white wooden bridge, with its row of urchins dropping flints upon the noses of elephantine trout, or fishing over the rail with crooked pins, while hapless gudgeon come dangling upward between stream and sky, with a look of sheepish surprise and shame, as of a school-boy caught stealing apples, in their foolish visages. Pleasant new national schools at the bridge end, whither the urchins scamper at the sound of the two o'clock bell. Though it be an ugly pile enough of bright red brick, it is doing its work, as Whitbury folk know well by now. Pleasant, too, though still more ugly, those long red arms of new houses which Whitbury is stretching out along its fine turnpikes,—especially up to the railway station beyond the bridge, and to the smart new hotel, which hopes (but hopes in vain) to outrival the ancient "Angler's Rest." Away thither, and not to the Railway Hotel, they trundle in a fly—leaving Mark Armsworth all but angry because they will not sleep, as well as breakfast, lunch, and dine with him daily,—and settle in the good old inn, with its three white gables overhanging the pavement, and its long lattice window buried deep beneath them, like—so Stangrave says—to a shrewd kindly eye under a bland white forehead.

No, good old inn; not such shall be thy fate, as long as trout are trout, and men have wit to catch them. For art thou not a sacred house? Art thou not consecrate to the Whitbury brotherhood of anglers! Is not the wainscot of that long low parlour inscribed with many a famous name? Are not its walls hung with many a famous countenance? Has not its oak-ribbed ceiling rung, for now a hundred years, to the laughter of painters, sculptors, grave divines (unbending at least there), great lawyers, statesmen, wits, even of Foote and Quin themselves; while the sleek landlord wiped the cobwebs off another magnum of that grand old port, and took in all the wisdom with a quiet twinkle of his sleepy eye? He rests now, good old man, among the yews beside his forefathers; and on his tomb his lengthy epitaph, writ by himself; for Barker was a poet in his way.

Some people hold the same epitaph to be irreverent, because in a list of Barker's many blessings occurs the profane word "trout:" but those trout, and the custom which they brought him, had made the old man's life comfortable, and enabled him to leave a competence for his children; and why should not a man honestly thank Heaven for that which he knows has done him good, even though it be but fish?

He is gone: but the Whit is not, nor the Whitbury club; nor will, while old Mark Armsworth is king in Whitbury, and sits every evening in the Mayfly season at the table head, retailing good stones of the great anglers of his youth,—names which you, reader, have heard many a time,—and who could do many things besides handling a blow-line. But though the club is not what it was fifty years ago,—before Norway and Scotland became easy of access,—yet it is still an important institution of the town, to the members whereof all good subjects touch their hats; for does not the club bring into the town good money, and take out again only fish, which cost nothing in the breeding? Did not the club present the Town-hall with a portrait of the renowned fishing Sculptor? and did it not (only stipulating that the school should be built beyond the bridge to avoid noise) give fifty pounds to the said school but five years ago, in addition to Mark's own hundred?

But enough of this:—only may the Whitbury club, in recompense for my thus handing them down to immortality, give me another day next year, as they gave me this: and may the Mayfly be strong on, and a south-west gale blowing!

In the course of the next week, in many a conversation, the three men compared notes as to the events of two years ago; and each supplied the other with new facts, which shall be duly set forth in this tale, saving and excepting, of course, the real reason why everybody did everything. For—as everybody knows who has watched life—the true springs of all human action are generally those which fools will not see, which wise men will not mention; so that, in order to present a readable tragedy of Hamlet, you must always "omit the part of Hamlet,"—and probably the ghost and the queen into the bargain.

CHAPTER I.

POETRY AND PROSE.

Now, to tell my story—if not as it ought to be told, at least as I can tell it,—I must go back sixteen years,—to the days when Whitbury boasted of forty coaches per diem, instead of one railway,—and set forth how, in its southern suburb, there stood two pleasant houses side by side, with their gardens sloping down to the Whit, and parted from each other only by the high brick fruit-wall, through which there used to be a door of communication; for the two occupiers were fast friends. In one of these two houses, sixteen years ago, lived our friend Mark Armsworth, banker, solicitor, land-agent, churchwarden, guardian of the poor, justice of the peace,—in a word, viceroy of Whitbury town, and far more potent therein than her gracious majesty Queen Victoria. In the other, lived Edward Thurnall, esquire, doctor of medicine, and consulting physician of all the country round. These two men were as brothers; and had been as brothers for now twenty years, though no two men could be more different, save in the two