EDITORS live by their eyes and mine go on the blink only after unremitting night work. In the spring at the conclusion of one of our prize contests I have occasionally developed a flick in my right eye and curiously this coincides with the opening of the fishing season. The tranquillity of water, the rest to the nervous system that comes from gazing at a shaded cove, the delight of watching an osprey or red-wing blackbird, the mystery of a pool where fish are feeding -these to me are precious, rejuvenating experiences.

There is a great pond not far from our summer cottage, whose changing moods it is a pleasure to explore. The body of water is thickly surrounded by conifers and beech out of which towers one huge landmark pine, and it can only be enjoyed by those who bring their own boat. No house, dock, or open road mars its shut-in tranquillity. Because it is little used, it is well used. Here are no eggshells, broken bottles, and stray papers to remind you of those casual travelers who love to litter. One deeply wooded point (known to us as Pulpit Corner because of the angler who still-fishes there for hours in his little high-seated skiff like a pulpit) has a rock-laid fireplace, and chunks of birch neatly cut and stacked for the newcomer. The few who use this pond do so with care and the apprehension that it cannot remain forever inviolate from the metropolis which lies only twenty-eight miles away.

With canoe lashed on the top of our car or in a borrowed truck, here we have come for innumerable family picnics. Noon is a good time to start, but even so, the hours are not long enough to satisfy the anticipation which has been building up since the night before. We lower the canoe gently into the little path through the reeds; we mount the fly rod; Ted takes his place in the bow; Fritzy or Sara in the thwart, with the lunch basket and Mickey, the spaniel --- shivering with excitement for all his sixteen years; the fish box is placed under my seat; and then we pole and battle our way through the water-path and out into the lake. Mickey, hindquarters trembling, peers intently over the gunwale as the water slides back. When he lets out an irrepressible yelp he speaks for us all; whereupon Ted, who is just as eager as he is, pokes him with the paddle.

With three years' familiarity we have pictured for ourselves the ground plan of this hidden water. Along this left bank the white perch have their habitat (or had --- have they moved?); Pulpit Corner is the private hunting ground of some big bass (we have seen and hefted a 4-1/2-pounder landed by the Pulpit Corner fisherman); directly opposite among those rocks are the bass beds, now deserted; the yellow perch are thick in the marsh water by the Outlet; the pickerel congregate in White Pine Cover; and there are one or two other dens --which I would rather not disclose --- where my flies and lures have caused explosions.

Round Pond is an unpredictable place. I am never sure when we shall find the cardinal flower, that small scarlet high-stemmed face close to shore, and whose reflection is so lovely against the green. Nor the wild white azalea. I have learned not to pluck the water lilies but not why there is an occasional one more rose-tinted than the rest. I have yet to know with any certainty which fly is the best for this water in July: I have seen a big bass come clear out of water for my Gray Ghost, and again and again I have seen a bass arrow after that fly when I had found their lair, but too often it is the pickerel, not the bass, which finally takes. I have seen all fish put down by a thunderstorm and I have been caught --- alone --- in one of those magical sunset hours when what seemed like a million fish were feeding on the hatch which lay strewn on the calm water, and when no artificial fly I had to offer distracted them for an instant.

So we spend ourselves. The excitement of fishing, like that of lecturing, shrivels the stomach; sandwiches eaten in the canoe are tasteless, while if eaten ashore the fever to be out paddling makes two of them a meal.

When the sun sets, the water under the trees turns black and cool fingers rise from the pond. In sweaters we ferry our way toward the exit. The back muscles are weary from paddling and the bottom has had quite enough of this canoe. We do things just a little irritably: Fritzy complains that the bilge has soaked her hair-do as we empty the boat and then lift it staggeringly up to the top of the car. Well, someone has to hold the lower end if I'm to lift the high. Grumbling, we lash it tight and tie the painter to the radiator cap; I strip the rod, call Mickey out of the reeds, and stow the gear, thinking how good a drink will taste. Then as I ease behind the wheel, for just an instant before I switch on the headlights we give back our benediction for such a sanctuary.

THE summer after V.E. Day, when gasoline no longer had to be hoarded, three of us bought a 16-foot skiff and an outboard motor powerful enough to buck the tides of the Ipswich Bay. This lovely tidal water, like a huge open left hand, with the little finger the largest, is the estuary of five rivers, the Ipswich, the Essex, the Parker, the Rowley and the Merrimac, and it takes knowing, for what was over your head when you shoved off downstream will be mud flats and a quaggy channel when you pole home after dark. As our boatman and guide we found Howard Wills, a paratrooper fresh out of the 101st Airborne; he had fished the Rowley as a boy, knew its every contour and was eager to regain his peace in the sun.

The Rowley, like most of our tidal streams, is wide and deep at the river mouth and for perhaps four miles thereafter; then it narrows and twists like a small creek to terminate in the headwaters not far from the Rowley Green; on highwater we rode between marsh grass and moor, on low we followed the narrow channel between muddy banks. A 9-foot difference. Howard would be waiting for us at the float, and when we were set he would cast off and wind the outboard. The motor, with Howard in his Tyrolean hat, his fish box, the bucket and the rods, sank the stern; while up in the bow, half out of water, his blond crew cut against the horizon, perched Ted. My picture is of a bright August morning, the sun points flicking the water, the bow thwacking down on the little waves, drops of spray flying and Ted eager to get the lines out, so sure that this time we'd get the big one. The wind in the face and the salt in the wind.

The sandy moors and marshes are a natural feeding ground for the migrants. On one afternoon's run from Rowley to the mouth of the Parker River, I saw purple martin pairing, dipping, and swooping together in that flight which resembles the grace of a ballet, and farther down I watched their counterpart, the swifts, darting in and out of their tenements in the sandy bank. I saw white crane, cold and immobile above the eelgrass; heard the protest of the shrike; heard the ponderous beat of the gray heron and was answered for an instant by the piercing whistle of Canadian plover.

For a time our little boat lay motionless against the marsh grass while we unkinked the trolling lines which had crossed; and as I gazed downstream, the water fifty yards distant was suddenly riffled as if young fish were feeding. A striped bass broke surface in a curving leap; and while he hung suspended in air, the pursuing force was revealed in the hungry ferocity of a seal's head. Fish and seal disappeared in the twinkling and were, I suspect, one. And the tide continued to run in. "Those seal," said Howard, "push 'em right out of water."

The five rivers in their confluence form an ever-refreshed feeding ground for the schools that in August turn north from Cape Cod. These incoming cycles of fish recall that cold-blooded but beautiful novel of the sea, Salar the Salmon, by Henry Williamson: first come the squid and herring, and feeding on them the striped bass that are in turn pursued by the tuna feeding farther out in the bay. The seal just play along the edges and take their choice, while overhead the terns, hovering close to the purple-shadowed water --- sure sign of the school beneath --- dive and dive again for the silver splinters driven to the surface by the tinker mackerel or the larger perennial hunger beneath.

In times past --- no time as fish go, but more than half a century for us --- the sturgeon and stripers were commuters to these streams. Then wood pulp and rubber goods, textiles, and ladies' girdles monopolized the power of white water and polluted the run. The fish went elsewhere to feed and to spawn. Cunners, flounders, cod, smelt, and haddock kept to the outer reach, venturing in on the fresh tides; the game fish made new rendezvous away from industry. Came the depression, mills closed down, and as streams ran clean again, the telegram went out underwater. The fish returned.

By day we calculated to fish the high tide and that precious hour at the turn when the stripers should be inshore; we carried our lunch with us in a bucket and we calculated to eat it two hours before high tide. Picnics, to which I have become an addict late in life, are the better for being cooked on the spot and eaten without sand. These took time, for the seaweed was far to seek and the beach, swept clean by last night's tide, had hidden its driftwood under the eelgrass at the foot of the dunes. We built our fire in the lee of a big rock with an old spar for the backlog and rocks to support the grill. The driftwood snapped with a heat as quick as charcoal.

There are almost as many ways of cooking lobster as there are appetites. Personally I like them small and I like them soft with the cream of their own still in the claws. On this occasion we had three inches of salt water in the bottom of our bucket, then a layer of seaweed, then a bundle of three lobsters tied in a cloth, then another layer of seaweed, until all nine lobsters were submerged. Then the bucket went over the hot fire, and was allowed to steam for fifteen minutes. With our backs against the rocks, crusty French bread in one hand, an ear of roasted corn on the paper plate, and a can of melted butter within reach, we feasted as you do when you use fingers, chin, nose, and teeth for the inhalation of good food. As we ate, our eyes kept wandering out to sea to catch the terns who might show up where the fish were feeding.

The wind had dropped; the nocturnal surf-casters waded in and now it was our turn. Fritzy burned the scraps in the embers, the fireplace was sanded, and sweaters went on as the eelskins were fitted over our hooks for our first run. To have more room in the boat, the bucket and picnic basket were left in a trustful group ashore. We shoved off and then turned for a preliminary troll just beyond the breakers, as close to shore as we dared. It was Howard's skill to reduce the speed of the motor until we were barely idling along; at this low speed our lures would be trolling close to the ocean's floor, which was the natural lair of the sand eels.

A 16-foot skiff can be cramped quarters for four people, and there were times when nature called and it was a relief to be set ashore. I remember Fritzy's embarrassment when, early in our acquaintance with Howard, she felt that such a moment had come. We were downriver and fortunately not far from a little shooting box on the marsh with a plainly discerned single-seater behind it. Above the hum of the motor Fritzy made known her request. "Sure," said Howard, "we'll put you right in there by the landing."

"Do you think the place is occupied? What'll I do if there is somebody in there?"

"Well, if there is somebody in there already," said Howard, "just say 'Push over'."

The striped bass is a night feeder, and the best chance of taking him is at dusk or after dark has fallen. The sight of those salt-boxes on the marsh which give the duck hunters sanctuary in November suggested a new possibility: Why couldn't we borrow one for overnight and then fish the flood tide under the full moon and again in the hour before sunrise? Howard was agreeable, but because of the hazard of night fishing he made one stipulation --- it would have to be a stag party and only one other rod beside myself, and he an adult. This just about broke Ted's heart.

In the mid-afternoon of our chosen day, Shaw McKean, Howard and I unlocked the borrowed salt-box, shook out the blankets in the soft southwesterly, tested the kerosene ring which would fry our eggs and bacon, and laid a fire in the little potbellied stove to warm us at midnight. The setting sun picked out the Coast Guard Station, the lighthouse and cottages on Plum Island in gold-edged detail. The wind dropped as we were eating our sandwiches and when night fell there was not a breath. We headed downstream timing ourselves to be at the very inlet of the estuary under the great cliff of Castle Hill as the tide turned at 10 o'clock. The moonlight was so bright you could read by it. As we approached the Hill we could see dark against the beach the surf-casters and hear the plop of their plugs. Keeping well beyond their range, we swung our lines over the deep side of the channel where the stripers would be entering with the tide. On our first run, I

suddenly hit a cement wall, and the reel was spun out of my control. Howard cut the motor and got out the flash torch. Shaw said, "Well, I'm damned," and began to reel in. My fish took out line ---20 yards-30 yards ---40 yards --- in a run of great power. Suddenly there was a dead slack and I thought I'd lost him until reeling in at full speed I realized that he had turned toward the boat. Again the rod bent down as he made a further spurt, and now Howard, who had been battling to keep us well off shore, began to follow the line with the electric torch. The pencil beam picked out the joining of the line and the water, and as our eyes became accustomed it silhouetted the dark fierce turning shape against the clear bottom. Now we could all see him as he fought the reel, and now he was on the surface, the gaff went into action, and with a heave the silver-scaled 18-pounder thudded onto the floorboards. "Well, I'm damned," said Shaw.

"Quick," urged Howard as he started the motor, "get the lines out. We should pick up one more before they're upstream." And we did.

We had scrambled eggs and beer at midnight, and it seemed like only ten minutes later when the alarm went off at 3:30. It was a darker, grayer world for the moon had set and the tide was running out, surging and sweeping us downstream. I had always been curious about the big depressions in the marsh grass close to the water's edge, and now I saw what caused them. They were the nests of the sleeping seal. As we approached you could see the big fellow rouse himself, flip to the water's edge, and lower himself, his eyes as resentful as those of a clubman in a bay window. Then he disappeared. We aroused four seals on our way down the Rowley that morning before we reached the river's mouth, and there, still trolling the eelskin, Shaw took our final fish. Of course we didn't stop then, we never do. It wasn't until the sun was well up and boats with fresh expectant faces were coming downstream that we headed for home. Yawning and rather pleased with ourselves, we held up three fingers as we passed.

FOR a few days each June I have the pleasure of exploring a brook in New Brunswick. The country is new to me, and the little stream seems quite inconspicuous judged by the open stretch which flows into the pond by the sawmill. I made my first entrance wading and splashing upstream against the current, and had gone hardly a quarter of a mile when I realized that this was a wilder, colder, deeper brook than I had imagined, and one that had not been soiled by visitors. I saw enough to invite another trip, and the next morning I followed the tote road into the woods, pausing now and then to eat the wild strawberries which lay in scarlet handfuls under the tall grass.

The right fork eventually led me into a clearing and on through thick alders and spruce into the calling water; now I started downstream, hugging the shore so as not to throw my shadow on the stream, and the journey which had taken me but half an hour by road unwound itself in three miles of twisting, tree-shadowed, rocky brook. I did not re-emerge at the mill until long past lunchtime.

What one first perceives in the brook world is the beauty of the light: in this sandy run the water is so clear, but down yonder as it coils under the shadow of the spruce it is blue-black, its depth a mystery. In each run one feels the cool of the shade, the fragrance of the conifers --- this is the breath of the brook. One goes on to notice the innumerable prints of deer, fresh on the sand bars where they have paused to drink; as I rounded one bend, I saw in the dark pool below me the small-headed arrow of a swimming animal, ferret, muskrat, or otter --- it was too far to tell; and all along I saw what nature's engineering will do to curl a brook.

It is always the biggest trees that fall; their great shapes athwart the stream form bridges, form islands, form pockets where the bigger brook trout lurk. These windfalls are sometimes powerful enough to break the brook in two. I spent some time at a fork where this had happened; a big hardwood provided the block for a dam of accumulated timber, mortised together by the spring run. The branch that curved off to the right was shallow, chattering, sunlit, but the one to the left ran deep under so many boles that my passage that way was out of the question. I probed the headwater with a stick and could not touch bottom; the fast current had eaten under the banks, forming the most desirable residences. "Lord," I thought, "what one could do here with worms and a hook!" I dropped in some scraps of bark and there was a swirl where the water sucked under the nearest log. "And how would you get him out if you got him on?" asked reason.

Eventually I wrenched myself away from that unfathomable run and went wading down the shallow branch. "What divides," I thought to myself, "must come together again in a really good pool. Perhaps a small Mickey Finn might do some business!" It did.

The dimensions of the brook world are ever-changing and this is part of its fascination. At one moment you are striding along like Paul Bunyan in a dwarfed river; then as you climb over the hurdle of a fallen tree, placing your boot carefully on the lower level, your balance teeters as the rotted wood gives way and you plunge forward into a pothole with a force that might have broken your rod or your leg. The conceit is jarred out of you and you right yourself with the feeling that this is a wild place.

The third day I went back as the afternoon shadows were falling. I knew where the pools were now, and I was intent on exploring with my fly rod every nook and cranny of the upper reaches, lovingly and minutely. For the more open water I had a little red fly with a yellow body, and for the deep pockets along the bank and under tree roots dry flies. Fishing is an act of privacy, and in a seclusion like this, one naturally talks to oneself. Rather irritably for the most part, for the woods are always conspiring against you. The kingfisher has flown ahead giving his warning, but your real antagonists are the trees at your back. You look behind you measuring the space for your backcast, and then facing front you concentrate on the square yard of water where you mean to place your dry fly, not in midstream but as close to the bank as you dare. You strip off line and cock your wrist for the first cast --- and at that point one of two enemies may intervene: the spruce at your back reaches out its arms to enmesh your leader, or the bank at which you are aiming pushes out a few inches further than you thought and snags your fly tight. The printable portions of your monologue sound like this: "There, right there, under the root . . . let it drift down to him . . . now . . . damn it, you're in the trees again . . . you can't lose that fly . . . will it pull out? . . . easy, now, easy . . . thank the Lord now, not so much line, you fool . . . that's no good . . . get it closer to his hole . . . closer, closer . . . oh, you ass, you've caught the bank . . . boy, you certainly have the touch today . . ."

But once in a while you do have it; the little fly floats down to the surface and the current edges it up to the door of the cavern; there is an explosion of water, the flash of a pink belly, and you are fast to a brookie, the most beautiful and certainly the sweetest-tasting of any small fish.

Then there is the pleasure of the return to the camp at Deer Point, the innocence with which you reply to Matt's skepticism, the moment when you spread the contents of the creel on the grass, and the aftermath when Helen has cooked that pink flesh just enough in the fry pan.

THE River Test as it flows through the village of Stockbridge is the most famous and exacting trout stream in the British Isles, and it was there that I went for my English initiation one spring. If ever there was a river made to order for anglers, this is it. It is a chalk stream and spring-fed, which means that there is a cold flow of water even on the hottest summer days. The banks had been freshly cut on the day of my arrival in early May, which meant that the fish -the brown trout and the rainbows --- had an alarming view of anyone who stood erect at the water's edge. The stream itself is gin-clear, and the current moves at a perfect pace for a dry fly.

I was lucky to be there, for the Beats (approximately four hundred yards of the main river and its attending sluiceways) in the vicinity of Stockbridge are booked solid from the end of April to the first of July, so I was told by Miss Kay Potts when I telephoned to ask permission.

"Well, Miss Potts," I said, "I shall be praying that one of your members may come down with an unexpected attack of measles while I am still in London. If this happens, will you please be sure to telephone me? I shall be praying hard."

That was on Tuesday, and on Thursday morning there she was. "Your prayers have been answered," she said. "One of our proprietors has telephoned to say that he must go off to the hospital for a checkup and he has released four and a half days for the week of May 7."

Since those were days when I was supposed to be seeing authors and publishers in London, my conscience would not let me play hooky for them all, but I did reserve Beat No. 5 for the evening fishing Monday and Beat No. 8 for the whole of Tuesday.

There is nothing in America quite like a cultivated English chalk stream. The Test, which is seldom wider than forty yards, is here controlled by a system of weirs so that the depth of the stream is fairly constant; and breaking off from the main current are shallow, narrow canals forming small marshy islands before they rejoin. This means that there will be good pools at either end of the island and that the brown trout, who seldom move from their favorite lairs, will be dimpling the water at regular intervals when the time comes for them to feed on the new hatch of flies. They are late risers and are seldom hungry before 1 A.M. The evening hatch of flies will be the big one, and the finest fishing, when the water is really roiled, comes after sunset.

The evening before my initiation had been blustering and cold with no hatch whatever, but that blessed Tuesday was full of sun; the wind had shifted to the southwest with just enough of a ripple to help the upstream casts of the amateur. My wife and I took a packed lunch and left it and our extra sweaters in the shade of a big willow. I had Beat No. 8, which is a perfect beauty, with a big island with good pools at either end, and the fast water going under the bridge to Longstock and emptying into a wide, spacious pool with a narrow aisle runoff to the south of the bridge. This I decided to reserve until after sunset. Meantime I fished the island and by 11: 30 it was a problem which rings to follow. For the fish were rising in number. They were bottom-feeding, showing their fins and tails, and they paid no attention whatever to Mr. Lunn's Particular. So I shifted to the Blue Upright and had three good strikes in the next fifteen minutes, each one of which I failed to hook.

I was striking too fast, and when Mr. Mott, the head keeper and a great gentleman, came by, he said, "Why, they really seem to have discovered the Blue Upright. Now let me show you."

And show me he did. He pulled up his boots and he got me down on my knees, and since my Wellingtons were short and the banks very wet, I was soon well soaked (I was to pay for this with three days of stiff rheumatism, but no matter). He showed me where to place the fly, and he also showed me how to hold my breath until I'd said to myself, "God save . . . the Queen!" --- and then hit. Together we netted two good fish before lunch, the larger being two pounds two ounces, and the other one pound twelve ounces, and I took another brace of about the same size in the gloaming.

One good fish was feeding beside the gunwale of a boat moored to the bank. It was an impossible cast to bring the fly over him with the wind blowing into the boat, but when I suggested casting it downstream, "Oh, I wouldn't do that," said Mr. Mott. "You see, sir, the Test is for upstream dry-fly fishing only."

Of the fish I lost, I remember best a great green and silver cruiser who came out from under a bank and showed me his whole perpendicular beauty as he rose straight up to turn and close on the fly. I slept with that picture for months afterwards.

No fishing day is complete without at least one good bumble; I made several, and the best as dark was coming on. I had been fishing the lovely capacious pool under the bridge, fishing the shallows into which the trout had moved after sunset. One strong fish had been hooked and netted, and he was such a beauty that after applying the priest to him I left him lying there in my net on the grass while I drifted back to look at the water. A small disturbance was going on in the shallow canal to my left. I had been drying my fly with false casts, and now without much thinking about it I let it fall in the little runoff. There was an explosion and I realized that I was into a bigger fish with my net hopelessly beyond reach. The fish and I played each other up and down the bank; he showed no signs of exhaustion, and this might have gone on until dawn if the English angler and his wife who had the Beat below me had not suddenly made their appearance crossing the weir. "Would you, like a good guy, loan me your net?" I called.

He came running, and after a certain amount of sputter the trout came ashore. "But you really should carry your net with you," admonished the Brigadier, after he had weighed my prize. "Otherwise you may find it rather awkward."

"Yes, sir." I replied.

The following morning my wife and I drove across country to spend the weekend in Oxford. We were to dine with Sir Isaiah Berlin and his charming wife, and I had telephoned him from the lodge to see if he would care for a brace of our trout. "Do you like fish?" I asked.

"Yes, on principle," replied Isaiah.

"Never mind the principle," I said. "These are brown trout taken last night in the Test and they weigh just under three-and-a-half pounds. If you don't care for them, I shall give them to someone else."

"My wife will never forgive you or me if you don't bring them." So bring them I did.

The other brace were intended for John Masefield, and we took them with us when we went to Abingdon for tea Saturday afternoon.

I look forward to these annual visits with the Poet Laureate, for he has the gift of opening up unsuspected chapters in English history as if he had been present when they took place and were telling me what he had seen. So he has told me of Roman Britain, and of the building of Hadrian's Wall, and of what happened in Bath when Rome itself had fallen to the barbarians. He has told me of the White Horse and of the Cerne Giant and of how these monster figures were originally carved in the chalk beneath the Downs, and of the spring observance which still keeps them fresh for our generation. He has told me of the coming of the Armada, and of the sinking of the Royal Oak and of the disaster which overtook Sir Cloudesley Shovel when he led the Mediterranean fleet home from Gibraltar only to wreck it on the Gilstone Ledges almost within sight of Plymouth harbor. Each time the words are as vivid as if he had been present as a spectator.

At the end of this tea I asked John if he knew how to clean fish, and since he didn't I thought the least I could do was to roll up my sleeves and get it over with as quickly as possible in the kitchen sink. It is a messy operation at best, and these were sizable brown trout, and when I had finished, Mrs. Pitts, the housekeeper, was not to be contained. She turned to John, who had been watching the operation, and said, "Mr. Masefield, I don't know whether I can tolerate this in my kitchen, all this mess your friend has made when I could have done it myself in 'arf the time."

THE river trails I follow in northern New Brunswick for ten happy days each summer are a complex of granite, moss, and the interlacing roots of spruce and fir, the path seldom wider than eighteen inches, where anglers and guides have been measuring their tread for nearly seven decades. Walking here is no straightforward business; the Northwest Miramichi has carved its winding way through a rocky gorge, and to keep pace with it the trail is alternately climbing or leaping down. There are only a few level stretches on the lip of the stream, and these are usually half under water; then a series of toeholds, rock and root, present themselves, and the mounting path takes one into the shade of the forest. One steps intently, eyes down, hearing the wash of the river, the four clear, plaintive notes of the whitethroat --- why has no composer ever used them as a theme? ---or the distant hammering of a woodpecker, and listening with expectation for the turbulence of white water which signals our approach to the salmon pool ahead.

The trail is most readable the second morning after rain, when the pockets between the roots will have dried and the moist earth will tell who has passed this way since sunset. One expects the print of deer and is always surprised by the larger evidence of moose: "Looks like somebody spilled a bag of prunes," remarks Henry, the more notional of our guides. A lacerated dead birch shows where the bear has been grubbing for ants, and once this summer I had the luck to intercept a doe between the path and the river's edge. Up she came, in steeplechase jumps, her white tail flying, so beautifully unerring as she placed her springs between the boulders and the deadfall.

The mornings are the best, the trail then so fragrant and the green so moist. Head down, one takes in the little things. On either side of the path with its cover of spruce needles are masses of bunchberry, its square white blossom set off glossily by the six-pointed leaf. One looks for the white lady's-slipper, the clusters of lavender catnip, or the tiny pink colonies of twinflower; shinleaf, the forest lily of the valley, and in rare openings, lady's-tresses and the purple-fringed wild orchid. The trail to Stony Brook dips through some rich river soil where for twenty yards the growth is outlandish: masses of Queen Anne's lace standing shoulder high ("stinkin' elders," Henry calls them), and topping them the fronds of the fiddlehead fern, from which we get a salad as delectable as cold asparagus. The logs which carry us across this mucky ground are guarded by a regiment of blue flags.

My feet are grateful for the moss which cushions the ledges. If it weren't for the thought of fish, I should study the mosses more closely, the plushy emerald green, the darker blue on the fallen logs, the needle moss like some tiny conifer. This green inlay is most vividly to be seen on the clearstone, the glistening white granite; here is a footstool for an Indian prince --- or a Boston editor, if I could find a way of keeping the moss on it alive and the stone forever moist in my library!

Howard, the camp philosopher, who has been working on the river for half a century, tells me that the forest floor is now much clearer than it used to be; the slash and dense underbrush are gone, and through the corridor of the trees one can sometimes see a spruce partridge. I try to tell him what the woods give me: the feeling of privacy which has become so rare in our urban life; the absence of litter not an empty beer can along the entire way --- and the reassurance I find in the unchanging beauty of the forest and the river.

It is two miles and a half from Camp Adams to Sam's Pool, and four pools to fish on the way. Walking that trail in waders in the early day, one feels like Mercury; the ten-foot rod is simply a longer finger; the musette swung from the shoulder, with its fly boxes and rain jacket, is no heavier than the bug dope on one's skin. Anticipation urges us, and if the heel skids on a slippery root it takes only an extra jump to restore one's balance. But it's a different story five hours later when with wet and heavy feet we turn back to camp. The arches have fallen, the toes cry out, the roots and the stubbing granite become personally belligerent; now a step wrenches the whole frame, and a mutter of protest ("Don't do that, you ape --- watch where you are going --- damn it, not that way") breaks out. At such times I remember an angler who was hit by polio in midlife and crippled from the waist down. But with that strength of arm and spirit which comes as compensation to such sufferers, he would literally haul his way along the trail, toiling half the morning for the joy of returning. I think how he must have studied every root, even the tiniest of the moss flowers; temper subsides and I go in humbleness.

WE WERE on our way to Plum Island for what was the boy's last until he returns from the Army. The sunlight had that hazy, suspended beauty of mid-October prompting you to take a good look while it lasts, and as we drove we noted as one does the new things that are always changing the familiar: here on Heartbreak Road is the new wayside stand where we found the best sweet corn in the summer; we passed the famous blueberry moors that have been so barren this year because of the spring frost; we noticed the dying elms on the Rowley Green and wondered if maples would be planted in their stead, and as we crossed over the span of the Rowley River, we saw that the tide was almost high and, judging from the pull on the buoys, coming in strong. Now our gaze was to the east, to the tawny marshes with the white-topped sand dunes marking the far barrier against the Atlantic. That is where we would be in another fifteen minutes, but first we paused at the Sportsmen's Rest, not for a beer, but to hear if they had had any word about the stripers.

The bartender referred us to two customers in long-billed caps. "It's a sheer gamble now," they said. "Last we heard of were taken early Sunday morning out of the surf by the old Coast Guard station. Small ones, school fish." That's where we intended to go anyway, and the native skepticism was usual.

The white road which leads into the Parker River Refuge took us six miles down the sandy thumb. We met the warden driving out and hailed him. "Anybody doing business at Big Sandy, or the Station?" we asked. "Haven't seen a fish or a fisherman. You'll have it all to yourselves." So in time we parked, and with the long glass rod and our bag of plugs climbed through our favorite gap in the dunes.

At the high point you pause to take it all in: the nine-mile crescent of immaculate beach, the sandy parapet built up by the last flood tide, and below that the wet brown ocean floor and the breakers. We looked for feeding gulls and found them, a small cluster inshore but far down toward the point, and closer, to the north of us but half a mile out, a rowdy colony of others. They were settling on the water when we arrived, but a minute later they were dispersed and in flight, and now we saw why, for they were hunting over a mile-long reef of feeding fish. Here, far, far beyond our reach, were the stripers we had come for, an enormous school of them whose presence darkened the water with a slight ruile and whose pursuit drove to the surface the little fish the gulls were swooping for. The gannets plummeted straight down from fifty or sixty feet, the sunset on their wings, and they hit the water like a shellburst. We began laying out a tinclad as far as we could cast on the chance that a truant from the school might have wandered inshore. But reason told us they were hopelessly out of reach. Meantime, we watched the geysers of water that flashed again and again in the far sunlight over the incredible reef.

In this hour it was our luck to be spectators. We saw cormorants riding the water as stolidly as tugs, and in another instant gone from view. We saw four white-winged scoters evenly spaced jetting their way south in their low undeviating flight; a scurry of sanderlings landed beside us for their twinkling, inquisitive business at the water's edge. I whistled, and the flock rose, took protective shape, veered away, and then settled right back again. The shellbursts continued far out in the fading light, and then as I lifted my gaze I saw coming toward us the ever-changing, unmistakable V of the Canada goose and heard at the same instant the creak and honking of their intercom. The first flight numbered twenty-five and was so low that we could mark and listen to the leader. Necks outthrust, white cheeks showing, the wingbeat so powerful, so regular, they came in right over us and then broke formation to mingle and form up with a much larger flight that had been following. Then, still in a V, they angled away from the ocean to the security of the bay, where --- did they know it? ---no shooting is permitted. Now the light and the flood tide were gone, and it was time for us to head for home. Fishing is not always for fish, as we have cause to know, and there is a retentive beauty about these last hours of the open months. On the way out the boy picked up a giant clamshell as white and unblemished as if it had come from the carver's hand. It will remind us.

THERE is always a feeling of ruefulness in putting a summer house to sleep for the winter. We cling to the woods of our three-acre moraine till the last possible moment, savoring the golden hours of Indian summer, reprieves which sometimes stretch into November, but conscious that we are doing things for the last time. This was my last fish on Beaver Pond, I think to myself, as I strip my rod in the dusk of a Saturday afternoon: the little lake is a cool black mirror enclosed with every scarlet variation of swamp maple, but not a single bass have I seen for three hours. In the shallows by the blackened lily pads the pickerel would occasionally arrow the surface; they have taken over the lairs of their large-mouth neighbors, where they were not privileged to venture in July. The bass have gone where all good bass go for the winter --- to the depths.

On this last weekend I go alone for my last trudge along the sands of Plum Island: the honking of the Canada goose had pierced my early morning sleep, and now I was listening to it again as another long V glided down against the later afternoon sun. No guns spoke, for this is sanctuary. The marsh is a cold brown, and as I turn at the top of the dune for a last look at the breakers, the wind from the north makes me shiver. Last time, last time. On the road home the closed cottages seem desolate; the roadside stand where we shopped for baby carrots and Country Gentleman is reduced to pumpkins and cider. Don't stop.

As the days become colder, it is only a matter of time before we must shut the water off. Meanwhile there are certain small urgencies to attend to: the family of gray squirrels who have taken up residence in the barn and whose youngsters enjoy chewing up my wife's leaves must somehow be induced out. The carpenter ants in the guesthouse must have the same steady, insatiable appetite for the living room beams, as their daily scattering of sawdust suggests, and one day we shall be stove in if they are not dislodged. Hay scented, the fast-spreading fern which would like to take over the whole of the rock garden needs thinning. No need to worry about the raccoons; they must miss the soft touch we are, but the hollow tree where they lodge has weathered every hurricane and they will keep warm and multiply. However, we should worry about our oaks: they are constantly underfed on the sour, meager soil of our ridge, and now we mark the dead limbs which ought to be cut before they crash down on the guesthouse. This is a job calling for ladders and tree surgeons, and I have a mental picture of the bill.

The leaves fall, the scenery is stripped away, and underneath we see what the pattern of tomorrow is doing to our countryside. As the city moves out, the contractors move in with their trucks and bulldozers. It is infuriating that a movement which portends a greater good for a great number should be spearpointed by an agent so ruthless. Contractors demand and receive political favors; with the tips they are given they acquire an interest in marginal land before the community knows what is coming. The wood lots come down fast as the throughways are built; contractors supply the sand and the gravel needed for the roads, and when the excavations have grown as big as a baseball diamond, they can be rented back to the politicos as a town dump. Brooks are diverted or simply left to flow into ranch house cellars after heavy rain.

I don't say that all contractors are corrupt; I say that there are too many among them who have so little respect for American values --- other than that of the quick buck --- that they need to be restrained. Neither private rights nor zoning laws are proof against their assault, nor does it reassure me to be told that this is all in the name of private enterprise. Just as we have a commissioner of motor vehicles to grant licenses and protect us against the hit-and-run driver, so there ought to be a commissioner of community development, an authority as invulnerable to bribery as Robert Moses, to protect us from the hit-and-run contractor.

Today, development and desecration go hand in hand from Bangor to Virginia Beach, and there is no authority local or federal to whom citizens can appeal when they see the locusts coming. If we really want to beat Egypt to the sand, okay; if we really want to duplicate on the East Coast the neon-lit, chromium. plated resorts which have made the coastline south of Los Angeles so hideous, just let the boys keep going.

This is what I brood over when I come back to the open fire. We are right in the midst of the perilous decade: Cape Cod as unexploited as Truro, beaches as breath-taking as Nauset, woods as cathedral as the Essex pines are ripe for the plucking unless there are citizens angry enough to stop it. (As I write this the residents of Concord have voted 603 to 38 to move the town dump to within one-third of a mile from Walden. Where else would you put the stuff!) This autumn, this week, we may be seeing some things for the last time.