knew of a place which would suit baby, and at the same time provide me with rational amusement-not golf, of course. I had vague ideas of catching enormous bass on a fly like a Camberwell Beauty; and recollections of conger eels resembling boa-constrictors, vari-coloured mackerel, and whiting of sumptuous fatness, floated through my mind. So shortly after our decision to migrate shorewards, I called at "The Pines" again, and found our neighbour in his study busy with a quantity of figures neatly written out on half-sheets of notepaper. I said I feared I was disturbing him: was he, I wondered, writing the Money Article, that enthralling column ? But no, he politely welcomed me, and said it was of no consequence; he was merely relaxing his mind by calculating the odds against his holding two trumps when each of his opponents held from one to five.

"There is something very fascinating to a vacant mind about the odds," he said.

"I

should probably waste my substance at Sandown if my wife had not such a horror of betting. Lyme Regis spoilt it all."

This thoughtful remark naturally surprised me not a little, and I was tempted to postpone the chief object of my visit in the hope of first drawing out my host a little. When you talk quietly to Anderson, tête-à-tête, he drifts off, as I have previously indicated, into delightful stories of fishing, which he invests with a peculiar charm I cannot reproduce on paper any more than I can draw his blue eyes and ruddy beard in pen-and-ink. Whether his yarns begin with a bishop or a cricket match, they always end up with a fish, and in general they bristle with sharp points like a Thames angler's tackle-box. Recollecting this, I thought his mention of Lyme Regis sufficiently promising, and threw my fly, in a manner of speaking, over the spot where he had risen.

"I came to ask you," I said suggestively, "about places like Lyme. I think of settling my little family down on the coast for a month or two as soon as the House rises, and when I go to them I should like some good scientific fishing. I want to catch something big, you know."

A peculiar expression, which I could not

analyse until afterwards, passed over Anderson's freckled face as he replied-

"You youngsters always want it big. You don't understand till you are forty that there is no pleasure in life like tickling a half-pound trout. But I sincerely trust that your experience in big bags may never be like mine."

Why, you speak as if you were Jonah, or had wrestled with Leviathan in the deep," I retorted. "What terrible experience have you had? I should guess you were half drowned by some monster salmon, or scared by sharks. Was that it?"

"It was at Lyme," he gravely replied; “and though some men might have thought nothing of it, it made a difference to us, and prevents my going to Sandown or the seaside at present." "This is myst'ry," I said tentatively. the details would not be painful to relate, pray give me your experiences."

"If

I thought he was chaffing me. He rose silently from his arm-chair, and carefully detaching a large pipe with a meerschaum bowl of the darkest hue from a hook on the wall, filled and lighted it with great deliberation.