as a matter of fact, I had only got hold of one--and the wrong--end
of the stick. I fished the Dulas for a fortnight, hypnotised, pondering
on the whole curious business, not only when the bright water rippled by
me, but when old Hoylake told me stories of mahseer and tiger fish and
barracuda that he had missed, when I was walking through the pinewoods
under the mountain, when I was eating, and, I verily believe, when I was
asleep. I had thought before that my friend Mrs. Payne was the heroine
of the story. Now I am not sure that Gabrielle does not share the
honours.

I

And, first of all, I dreamed of Roscarna. Partly for the sheer pleasure
of reconstructing a shadowy countryside that I remembered, partly because
Roscarna, the house in which the Hewish family had run to seed in its
latter generations, was very much to the point. Twenty miles from
Galway--and Irish miles, at that--it stands at the foot of the mountains
on the edge of the tract that is called Joyce's Country, a district
famous for inbreeding and idiocy where everyone was called Joyce,
excepting, of course, the Hewishes of Roscarna, who were aliens,
Elizabethan adventurers from the county of Devon, cousins of the Earls of
Halberton, who had planted themselves upon the richest of the Joyces'
lands in the early seventeenth century and built their house in the
English fashion of the time.

I imagine that it was the founder of the house who paved his river bed
with marble slabs, smoothing the stickles into a long clear slide.
Labour, no doubt, was cheap or forced, and the Elizabethan fancy lavish.
In the mouth of the valley, where it opens on the lake, they planted a
girdle of dark woods growing so near to the new house that the Hewishes,
walking in their gardens, could almost fancy themselves in England and
lose sight of the mountain slopes that swept up into the crags behind
them. The house stood with its back to the hills and all western
barrenness, looking over a level, terraced sward, past a river that had
been tamed to the smoothness of a chalk stream, to homely woodlands of
beech and elm that might well have been haunted by nightingales if only
there had been nightingales in Ireland. There were no nightingales in
Devon, so that the first Hewish was under no necessity of importing them
to complete his picture. But he had his gravelled walks, his poets'
avenue of yews, that grew kindly, his sundials with their graceful and
melancholy adm