system, as being destructive to coat-pockets, was at once extinguished by the Contessa.)
Baron Tolnay's System.
Baron Tolnay, being in a sort of way the King of the Djernis valley, objected to both the doctor's and the Conte's systems. The bombs he considered unnecessarily destructive, and the Contessa's ideas with regard to the ruin of coat-pockets were warmly seconded by him. He had no objection whatever to the presence of the fair sex, and he had a particular partiality for dusk; but why, he argued with a semi-royal hauteur – why labour with one's own hands, when there are hands enough to labour for one?
"I will order out a dozen of those lazy Roumanians," he said, with that expressive smile of his, which showed a flashing double row of teeth: "six of them shall wade up the river, and drive the fish before them with stones, and the others shall hold the nets across; and meantime, we can sit on the bank and watch the spectacle in comfort; or, if we find anything more amusing to do, we need not watch the spectacle at all."
Mr Howard's System.
As for Mr Howard, he regarded the bombs, the broken meat, and the wading Roumanians, all with equal and unutterable contempt. This Englishman, cut after so uncompromising a pattern of his nation as to be more English than John Bull himself, recognised nothing but the severest rules of orthodox and stern-principled trout-fishing. To approach a trout with any weapon but a rod of Farlowe's; to throw a March-brown in April, or a green-drake in June; to bait his hook with salmon-roe, like an English poacher, or with grasshoppers, like an unenlightened foreigner, – would, in Mr Howard's eyes, have been heresy, pure and simple; as bad as taking an advantage in a duel would be for a Frenchman, or cheating at cards for an Italian, or shooting a fox for John Bull himself. Any fish not caught in accordance with the above-named principles, was, in Mr Howard's eyes, not caught at all. "There are one or two pools here where one might possibly spin a minnow," he had said reflectively, but for the stickles there is nothing but a grilse-fly.
The Landlord's System.
Flies! The landlord had no opinion whatever of those puny hooks with little tufts of feather upon them, which Mr Howard called flies. He would like to show them something that was like a fly indeed: a marvel of mechanism, wound up by clock-work, and kept thus in motion for twenty minutes at a time. That was a fly, as large as a butterfly almost! A patented fly, too, but unfortunately as yet too little known hardly more known than when he had first met this marvel of mechanism fifteen years ago. That had been in the landlord's obscure days – as obscure as the fate of the mechanical fly itself – when he still held a very modest position connected with knives and forks; long before the time when he had won the landlady's heart, and stepped into the place vacated in such a tragical manner.
These were the principal systems which came into fashion in the Hercules Valley; but each of the fundamental ideas begot a fry of smaller ones. There were combinations and modifications, and a host of interpretations. The two young tallow-faced Recsulescus, for
