Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill MAY-DAY ON THE EXE " Six weeks every year among crag and heather," is Charles Kingsley's prescription for the Londoner's holiday; and, all things considered, it is no bad one. If he is a comparatively free agent, he may apportion them more or less according to his pleasure. For my own part I incline to a fortnight in spring, the last week of April and the first of May, and the rest divided between August and September. This is, of course, only individual preference, and is inspired by the fact that I must have my spring trout-fishing even at the cost of suffocating in London during July. There are many people who agree with me. About the middle of April you shall often see a contemplative person standing with his back to the busy throng and hisface to a fishing-tackle shop. If you are in a gloomy mood you may moralise at sight of him on the vanity of human wishes, and picture to yourself the horrid gnawing at the soul of the man, the regret for the holidays in past years never to be enjoyed again ; but if, on the other hand, you are cheerful and pleased with the world, you may look on him as a pretty picture of pleasant indecision, merely perplexed as to whether he will want two dozen large March browns or three dozen, and wondering whether the bushes are going to be as deadly to flies this year as they were last. I believe that this cheerful view is the right one to take, for if he cannot get his holiday your angler becomes morose and avoids tackle-shops and all that may remind him of what he is losing. Yes, a man who gazes at the wares in a tackle-shop on a sunny day in April has certainly a fishing-expedition in prospect. It would be too terrible to imagine a poor wretch with the spring and the streams calling to him unable to obey the call. There is nothing mor...