Into the question of the cruelty of the sport we do not enter; but its soothing, tranquillising character cannot be denied. For ourselves, our business is not to angle, but to observe. As we row past these grave and solemn men, absorbed in the endeavour to hook a dace or gudgeon, and recognise among them one or two of the hardest workers in London, we feel, at any rate, that the familiar sneer about "a rod with a line at one end, and a fool at the other," may not be altogether just.

Passing a series of verdant lawns, sloping to the river's brink, we reach Mapledurham and Purley, on opposite sides of the river at one of its most exquisite bends. The former place is celebrated by Pope as the retreat of his ladye love Martha Blount; when

"She went to plain-work, and to purling brooks,
Old-fashioned halls, dull aunts, and croaking rooks."

The latter was the residence of Warren Hastings during his trial, and is not to be confounded with the Purley in Surrey, where Horne Tooke wrote his celebrated Diversions, on the origin and history of words.

The next halting-place is Caversham, sometimes magniloquently described as "the port of Reading." Here the Thames widens out, as shown in the view which prefaces the present chapter; the eel-traps, or "bucks," extending half across the river. On the occasion of our visit to the spot, it was our intention to stop for the night at Caversham; but as the inn was crowded and noisy, we resolved to push on to Sonning. The evening was already closing in, and before we reached our destination it had grown dark. The trees stood up solemnly against the sky, from which the twilight had not wholly departed. Their shadows fell mysteriously across the river, rendering the task of steering a difficult one.

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At length the welcome lights of the village were descried through the deepening gloom; and we landed, having suffered no more serious mishap than running into an ait, which our steersman mistook for a shadow, in the endeavour to avoid a shadow which he mistook for the bank. Next morning, after a plunge into the clear cool water of the pool at the foot of Sonning Weir, a scamper round the village, a climb to the top of the tower for the magnificent view, and a hearty breakfast, we were ready for an early start, whilst the dew was yet on the grass, and the air had not lost its freshness. Here the Kennet, "for silver eels renowned," as Pope has it, flows in from the southwest, with its memories of the high-minded and chivalrous Falkland, who fell at the battle of Newbury, on the banks of this river. A little lower down the Loddon enters the Thames from the south, between Shiplake and Wargrave. The picturesque churches of these two villages were soon passed, and we entered the fine expanse of Henley Reach, famous in boat-racing annals. Here for many years the University matches were rowed before their removal to Putney. No sheet of water could be better suited to the purpose, and the change is regretted by many boating-men.