ds and crystal brooks,
With silken lines and silver hooks.

Let others freeze with angling reeds,
And cut their legs with shells and weeds,
Or treacherously poor fish beset
With strangling snare, or windowy net.

Let coarse bold hands from slimy nest
The bedded fish in banks out-wrest;
Or curious traitors, sleeve-silk flies,
Bewitch poor fishes' wandering eyes.

For thee, thou need'st no such deceit,
For thou thyself art thine own bait;
That fish, that is not catch'd thereby,
Alas! is wiser far than I.

[Illustration: _Pyrford Church._]

Two miles further down the Canal--perhaps nearly four by the Wey
itself--stands another little church, almost, like Pyrford and Woking,
on the edge of the stream. Wisley church is the tiniest of the little
group between Send and the Thames, but is not otherwise remarkable. The
village is not much more than a farmhouse and a noble barn; perhaps
Wisley is better known for its pond and its garden. The garden,
unhappily, is almost a thing of the past. Experiment and officialdom
have settled heavily on its sandy soil, and the wilder charm of the old
pleasance has left it. A few years ago, when its late owner, Mr. Wilson
of Weybridge, was alive, it was a delight to many hundreds of visitors,
whom the owner generously allowed to share in his pleasure in rare and
beautiful flowers. He had collected into a few acres of ground,
protected by ingeniously laid out plantations, an almost incredible
variety of plants, especially flowering bulbs, and in his woods and
ponds, besides, had tried to establish other curious and interesting
wild life. Bird-boxes fastened to the trees were to tempt tits and
nuthatches; in the reeds of the ponds great bull-frogs used to squat
croaking, and little green frogs climbed the leaves above them. To-day
that is hardly more than a memory. When the owner died the garden was
bought by Sir Thomas Hanbury and presented to the Royal Horticultural
Society. The society came down from Kew upon the fold; and on the open
ground beside the old garden, tangled and unhappy, set down a row of
superb glasshouses, planted a number of specimen fruit trees, and
devoted itself forthwith to up-to-date research and education on the
most approved lines of modern scientific arboriculture and hybridisation
in hothouses.

[Illustration: _Wisley Church._]

Last of the little bunch of Weyside churches is Byfleet, with a belfry
buil