# An Angler at Large/Chapter 4

Joe tells me that this season there are three men besides myself who are entitled to fish hereabouts.
Joe is the keeper. The three men are:—
1. Slattery.
2. A Mr. Blennerhassett.
3. A Mr. Purfling.
Slattery I know already. He lives here, and is a permanent rod. I call him Slattery because it is not his name, and because I have always wished to know a man called Slattery, and I have never been so lucky. This is the best I can do. Slattery is a man of science. He owns a motor-car and a billiard-table and a beautiful garden and a kind heart and Mrs. Slattery. Slattery is Fortune's pet. His business, however—there are drawbacks even to being Slattery—keeps him from the river all day; but by seven o'clock he is there. I shall see him at seven o'clock this evening, and it will be a good meeting.
Purfling I have yet to meet.
​Mr. Blennerhassett dawned upon me this morning, at the Lower End.
Before I permit him to dawn upon you, let me say something of the Lower End. I want you to know this length of the Clere because it is the most beautiful place in the world. Thus, as we go along I propose to do my best—my insufficient, my miserably insufficient best—to make you see it all as I see it.
I fancy that the sadness which sharpens our delight in any rarely beautiful experience arises from our knowledge that it is not to be captured. We are doomed to lose it. There is to be no putting of it away in a drawer, whence we shall be able to take it out and relive it again and again. Presently it will be gone, and no trick or force of memory shall bring it back. Again, we feel the hopelessness of any such attempt. These exquisite things of the senses may not be translated into any such cumbrous medium as language. But though we despair, we try.
Of the Lower End, then, I will say that it is broad and deep, dark, heavily weeded, flowing leisurely between rushes and reed beds and withy beds, under thick woods of beech and aspen and willow; a water for great fishes (not many), unfriendly to small, not to be netted, pike haunted. ​It is a region that well fits the frame of mind induced by black, thundery weather, when the water looks like lead, and the trout lie on the bottom, and there is no fly, and one has smoked one's last cigarette. Yet in sunshine and in this early season it has a beauty that the more open water above lacks, a beauty of shadow and colour, when the light filters yellow-green through young beech leaves, and mingles with the brown-green that the river weeds reflect upwards where the jewelled heart of the wood joins the glowing depth of the stream.
From one bank lush water-meadows spread away to the foot of the downs, and the stuggy, good-natured pollards stand in rows along the ditches and lead the eye unenviously to tremendous elms, shadowing the valley road. Yes, if you turn your back on the river (he will take no offence) the scenery is cheerful enough. Here the Valley is broader than above, the wind has a freer sweep and the clouds seem to sail more steadily; and the cuckoos, I swear, fly here and shout more vigorously. I have often been wonderfully uplifted at the Lower End. There is no part of the water where meditation (an important branch of dry-fly angling) may be practised with less chance of interruption, and there is no part which I do more heartily love. For here the days begin.
​Such was the scene of my encounter with Mr. Blennerhassett.
I had been waiting during two hours for something to happen. At last it happened. It was a very unpromising little ring, but (because one never knows) I cast over it two or three times. Then I sat down waiting for it to happen again.
Something else happened.
Down the bank—the bank, mark you! not the meadow—two feet from the verge, as I live—came striding a handsome, healthy young man, ruddy, caparisoned for angling. He held his head high, his chest thrown out. A moustache bristled upwards from his lips. As he perceived me a look of haughty disdain disfigured his personable face. He came forward authoritatively. A willow forced him out of the direct path, and so, without disturbing my fish (if it was still there), he reached my side. He was good enough to inquire if I had done anything. I said that I had just failed to hook a fish. He said that he hadn't seen a damned thing all morning. I asked if this was Mr. Blennerhassett. He said it was, and asked me what was the best fly. I told him what I thought was the best fly. He asked me what I thought was the best place at this time of day. I told him the Mill, which is at the extreme top of the water. He said he had ​already been there, and there wasn't a damned fish moving. I expressed my regret.
At this moment a little ring appeared in the water just where I was looking for it.
"A rise!" said Mr. Blennerhassett. "A rise, by God!"
He knelt down and began to switch out line. I passed my hand over my eyes. I thought that I was mad. I was not. When I removed my hand he was covering my fish. It was a deft cast. The fish rose; subsided.
"A damned dace," said Mr. Blennerhassett, reeling in.
I was quite dumb.
"Well," he observed, "I'll get on up the water." I wished him good sport. He strode away without replying. I observed him halt almost immediately, and begin to make very long casts towards the further bank, where I had been expecting a fish to show itself for half an hour.
My fish again rose. It was, as Mr. Blennerhassett had surmised, a dace. As I returned the poor little thing I heard my new acquaintance furiously shouting. "Have you a net?" he bellowed. I saw that his rod was bent.
I was now compelled to run up the bank with a net for this Blennerhassett. When I arrived I found that his trout was in the weeds. The ​water was about five feet deep. It was not, however, necessary for him to order me into it, because the fish disentangled itself and came to the bank and was peremptorily knocked on the head. I congratulated the Blennerhassett.
He left me instantly.
I wonder what Purfling is like.