bottom. One winter old
Sir Jocelyn took it into his head to clean up this bit of water, and when
they came to scrape the bottom they found under the mud that the whole
bed of the stream was paved with marble slabs like a swimming bath ...
Connemara marble. They went on with the job because it looked so well,
all this green, veined stuff shining through the clear water. So they
scoured the bottom and fixed up a banderbast for keeping the mud from
coming downstream from above, and having made a sort of stewpond, put in
four or five hundred yearling brownies. You'd never believe how those
fish grew. In a couple of years the water was full of three and four
pounders, lovely fish with a small head and pink flesh like a salmon.
Quite a curious thing! And you'll never guess the reason. No sooner had
they cleared away the mud than the place swarmed with freshwater shrimps.
The yearlings throve on them like a smolt when it goes down to the sea.
That was the remarkable thing about Roscarna...."

I knew, of course, that it wasn't. The remarkable thing about Roscarna,
to anyone with a ha'porth of imagination, was Gabrielle Hewish. Luckily
that admirable gossip Hoylake had another interest in life besides
fishing stories, and one that served my purpose,--genealogy. It is an
interest not uncommon with old soldiers--that is why they often write
such incredibly dull memoirs--and after allowing him a number of sporting
digressions in the direction of a Lochanillaun pike and the altogether
admirable blackgame shooting at Roscarna, which, he assured me, was
better than anything in the west except Lord Dudley's shoot on the
Corrib, I played him tactfully into the deeper water that interested me
and, by the end of the week, had succeeded in drawing from him a good
deal of irrelevant family history and, what is more to the point, a
fairly consecutive account of the last of the Hewishes, Sir Jocelyn and
his amazing daughter.

As he told it to me in the parlour of the fishing inn beside the Dulas, I
began to realise that accidentally, and at the moment when I needed it
most, I had stumbled on a fountain of curious knowledge. If I had missed
meeting him, my story, fascinating as it was, would have been incomplete.
It armed me with a whole new theory of Gabrielle, suggesting causes, or,
if you like, preparations for the extraordinary episode that followed.
It showed me that I had been flattering myself that I knew all about it
when,