99

BY STREAM AND SEA.

PART I.

MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS ON ANGLING

AND RAMBLING.

B

BY STREAM AND SEA.

CHAPTER I.

A HERTFORDSHIRE VALLEY.

MONG the many tributaries which feed old Father Thames during his proud career through a drainage basin estimated, I believe, at over six thousand miles, commend me, in the double capacity of wanderer and angler, to the Colne. It is within easy reach of town, it is very fairly stored with fish, and it traverses interesting and, in some portions of its course, exquisitely beautiful scenery. How many Colnes there may happen to be in this country I know not; my Colne is not, however, the feeder of the Calder which receives the foul discolouration of the West Riding cloth factories, nor the stream of that name which runs through the north-eastern part of Essex to Colchester, nor the little Coln (so often spelt with a final e) that rises in the Cotswold Hills, and gives some occasionally worthy trout fishing at Fairford. My Colne is that lovable stream which brightens a goodly section of pastoral Hertfordshire,

which for two miles and a half keeps boundary between Herts and Middlesex, and which in the last fourteen miles of its length mostly marks the border-line between Bucks and Middlesex, as the Lea across the county marks the border-line on the eastern side.

Rising near historical Hatfield, the Colne soon begins to receive additions right and left, its infancy being by this reason much shorter in duration than that of most streams; very quickly

"The struggling rill insensibly is grown

Into a brook of loud and stately march,
Cross'd ever and anon by plank and arch;
And for like use, lo! what might seem a zone
Chosen for ornament; stone match'd with stone
In studied symmetry, with interspace

For the clear waters to pursue their race
Without restraint."

One of the earlier branches of the Colne, the Verlam, is considerably larger than itself, and this is the stream which passes by Lord Bacon's Gorhambury and the ancient shrine of St. Alban's. By Watford the Colne flows through flat marshy meadows, overlooked by the London and NorthWestern Railway, and busily peopled in winter-time by grey plovers and many passing feathered visitants, and touches the quiet old-fashioned town of Rickmansworth, where we may find it convenient to halt at the head-quarters of our Hertfordshire Valley.

From this centre you may wander away into the woods to the north, into Moor Park, once the habitation of Cardinal Wolsey, James Duke of Monmouth, and Lord Anson, and now the country house of Lord Ebury; or into Rickmansworth Park, where you may pass a long delightful summer's day under the shade of grand avenues of trees,

none daring or caring to make you afraid. Or to vary your experience you may take the canal towing-path, and trudge over its loose' gravel until you heave a sigh of thankfulness in Uxbridge, of which it was once said that the only thing to be noticed respecting it was the house in which the Commissioners appointed to arrange the little differences between Charles Stuart and his bristle-backed Parliament sat fourteen days in conference, and never arrived at a satisfactory conclusion after all.

The first sight of Rickmansworth from the window of your railway carriage is a very pleasant one, the taper spire of the parish church rising out of the trees as one always likes to see it rise in country places, where ecclesiastical rooks and episcopal jackdaws like to claim a share in the benefits which Church and State bestow upon the land. There is a rare colony of these garrulous belfry haunters at Rickmansworth, and sometimes the approach of the train, though it is the slowest railway travelling in the kingdom, sends them wheeling over spire and trees in noisy clouds.

Very peaceable and-if I might say it without offence of a town in which I have spent many happy hours-very humdrum is Rickmansworth. Of course, like other oldfashioned places with a history, it has had its excitements. Take, as a specimen, the matter set forth on a timeworn black-letter document in the British Museum, bearing date 1525 and beginning: "Be it knoun to all cryste people which joyeth in theyr hartes of ye power of God shewed by his own precyous body i fourme of brede in ye chyrche of Rykmersworthe where wretched and cursed people cruelly and wylfully set fyre upon all ye ymages." This was the head and front of the offending, and the cardinal of the period liberally offered indulgences to whomsoever would aid in restoring the cremated effigies. Rickmansworth