But there is no response from the fish.

“Keep terrifying of him, keep terrifying of him,” whispers Tom; “he’s bound to make a mistake sooner or later.”  So we try again, and at the same moment that the fly floats down over the monster’s nose he moves a foot to the right and takes a live may-fly with a big roll and a flop.

“Well, I never!  Try him with a may-fly, sir,” says Peregrine.

Thinking this advice sound, we hastily put on the first may-fly of the season; and no sooner have we made our cast than, as Rudyard Kipling once said to the writer, there is a boil in the water “like the launch of a young yacht,” a tremendous swirl, and we are fast into a famous trout.  Directly he feels the insulting sting of the hook he rushes down stream at a terrific rate, so that the line, instead of being taut, dangles loosely on the water.  We gather the line through the rings in breathless haste—­there is no time to reel up—­and once more get a tight strain on him.  Fortunately there are no weeds here; the current is too rapid for them.  Twice he jumps clean out of the water, his broad, silvery sides flashing in the sunlight.  At length, after a five minutes’ fight, during which our companion never stops talking, we land the best fish we have caught for four years.  Nearly three pounds, he is as “fat as butter,” as bright as a new shilling, with the pinkest of pink spots along his sides, and his broad back is mottled green.  The head is small, indicating that he is not a “cannibal,” but a real, good-conditioned, pink-fleshed trout.  And it is rare in May to catch a big fish that has grown into condition.

We have now four trout in the basket.  “A pretty dish of fish,” as Peregrine ejaculates several times as we walk up stream towards the washpool.  For thirty years he has been about this water, and has seen thousands of fish caught, yet he is as keen to-day as a boy with his first trout.  As we pass through a wood we question him as to a small stone hut, which appeared to have fallen out of repair.

“Oh!” he replied, “that was built in the time of the Romans”; and then he went on to tell us how a great battle was fought in the wood, and how, about twenty years ago, they had found “a great skeleton of a man, nearly seven feet long”—­a sure proof, he added, that the Romans had fought here.

As a matter of fact, there are several Roman villas in the neighbourhood, and there was also fighting hereabouts in the Civil Wars.  But half the country folk look upon everything that happened more than a hundred years ago as having taken place in the time of the Romans; and Oliver Cromwell is to them as mythical a personage and belonging to an equally remote antiquity as Julius Caesar.  The Welsh people are just the same.  The other day we were shown a huge pair of rusty scissors whilst staying in Breconshire.  The man who found them took them to the “big house” for the squire to keep as a curiosity, for, “no doubt,” he said, “they once belonged to some great king”!