THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES Super Flumina Super Flumina ^Angling Observations of a Coarse Fisherman Super flumina Babylonis y illic sedimus et flevimus : dum recordaremur tui Sion. London eva)v e/xe 8e (pdeyyovro } rare 7' vararov, a^yv^evoi Ktjp. iyQvai, rot? oXir/OKTi &6\ov Kara et'Sara e? TTOVTOV irpotrja-i /Soo? /cepa? d5 047' acrTratpoines aeipovro irporl Trer/oa?. Od. xn, 247.* You see, Homer knew sea-fishing with a long rod, and his hooks were of horn, and evidently small, for little fish. That is an improvement upon Egyptian methods. In the Fourth book too, the comrades of Menelaus were always angling in Pharos. aid yap Trepl vfj? rr/s vtpl OdXarrav #i;pas TTOTC Xa/3oi /xi/T (yprfyopCxri fiJ/re a/Sow* apyov Brjpav SiairofOV/xevoiS. STALLBAUll. 62 ^Prophecy and certainly does as Dame Juliana Berners bears witness. Anyhow Plato, to my own great relief, allows angling. " The fisherman too, may be allowed his sport in all places except harbours, sacred rivers, fens and marshes, if only he does not use the herbal defilement" to poison the water. Plato's disparagement of angling is not hard to understand if you turn to the Sophist, for he saw in the angler a lively picture of his mortal enemy, the sophist, who caught unwary victims by guile, striking them about the head, with his deadly skill. So it is a very great concession that he allows a sport in the Laws, which he would not tolerate in his earlier writings.* But why not in harbours, marshes and fens ? asked my cousin. Nominally no doubt because the fish would be less wholesome, in these places, but really because the sophists left the lean and rugged lands, the poor and the strenuous, and gathered in flocks upon the fat, rich lands the wealthy classes. If you press me I must confess also that Plato would much prefer the * fwypodr)pe\iTT}v 8e irXrjv ev Xt/ieVt KCH tepots Trora/iois re ccai eXeo-i teal Ai/xvais, cv rots aAAois Sc eTTa> Orjpcvftv, firj xpv Trepiyu^/ccTov r]K Kaff vSap Kvpraxrev avrfj-j) ey/carov e/wrveiW ' TO 8' dvcVrarai acr^/xari oiSaXeov, TrX^cre Se Tiraivd/icvov (rr6fj.a 107 Super Flumina fyxc'Avot ' TTVOVQ SJ irtpi'l}J.lOpT]O<; av\ov c^wv ^pcio-ev viro (rro/xo VO~IJTTJpOS. Sometimes we catch a glimpse of why the Romans crowned old Oppian. Surely he had the key to their hearts ! (iii 257). " Hunger thou in-bred Fiend, whose stern Com- mands Nor Brutes, nor lordly Man himself withstands, Extortioner, to All alike unkind, Slave to the Sense, but Rebel to the Mind ; All Appetites to thee, all Passions yield, And reason quits the scarce disputed Field, Her Throne usurp'd, Companions of thy State, Stinging Disgrace, and vengeful Ate wait, Thy power the winged Songster's Flight o'ertakes, And drives the Lion roaring thro' the Brakes, Pursues the Serpent thro' the mazy Way, And o'er the Reptile World asserts the Sway. But when thou div'st to liquid Worlds below, The Sea-born kinds thy fiercest Fury know, Here various Deaths thy fierce Emotions wait : On Earth thou triflest, but in Seas art Fate." Oppian is thus, as may be seen by these 1 08 In 'Dispraise of the Latins two extracts, a practical man and a moralist. In both these characters he should be dear to us English. But he is also a retailer of romance, and one learns, not without shrink- ing, of the depraved appetites of fish. The Wrasse gives way to shocking paroxysms of jealousy. The Preke* has an olive habit, and will hug any part of Athene's tree with amorous dementia. But the Sargof is not contented with a vegetable love. (iv. 388). " The Sargo scorns the natural Embrace, Admires the Goat, and courts the bearded Race, The scented Females of the Mountain craves, Himself a Native of th' inconstant Waves. Strange that the Hills and briny Seas should share A lover in a kind, consenting Pair ! " When the goats come to bathe in the dog- days, the Sargo plies his suit and follows his hirsute love to the very brink of the sea, and leaves her with tears in his eyes. Thus Oppian muses, not without satire : " Unhappy Lovers ! You too soon will find Your Pleasures insincere, your Goats unkind." The fisher, dressed as a nanny, with a rod [*I am as uncertain as to the Preke, as Mr. Micawber was about the gowans, and the pulling of them]. [\Diplodus Vulgaris\. 109 Super Flumina and goat's feet baits, catches the unnatural rascal. If space allowed much might be added to this, particularly the account of the Dolphin in book V, and why it is an unforgiven sin to kill one. no CHAP. VII e^ Charge of Tike. IT is a mournful fact that the Pike, who will devour most other fishes in the water, will, unless he is restrained, devour them in the hearts of anglers. Salmon, of course, are still more voracious, but salmon should be kept out of the mind if a common man wishes to angle with con- tent. They are hall marked for the mighty, and need not disturb the calm of the weekly sabbatical angler. He is content to see them mongered, and on state occasions to poise fragments upon his fork Salmon of course but we forget about them, as of Mahseer, Tarpon, Sturgeon, and other rari- ties. But Pike they are not so easily banished. One meets them in the roach holes. It is thanks to them that the dace play in the shallows. It is their doing that perches are so punctilious, so insistent upon being recognised at home and ashore. Who taught the rest to be so coy ? Who trained them from fryhood to clean run maturity to guard their interests so sed- iii Super F I urn in a ulously ? Who keeps them from feeding upon the likely days ? Who plays the Mal- thus and keeps down the population with sharp-toothed arguments ? Who is respon- sible for snapping many a thread of hope, and of silkworm gut ? Whose green gleam awakens the hope of the neophyte with a worm and keeps him rapturous and light for long unprofitable hours ? Who forces the banksman to troll, and to spin in spite of himself? Who makes gudgeon catching tame ? Who, in a word, rules the rivers and lakes, and the anglers in these ? It is the deputy Lieutenant Governor, the Acting Magistrate, the man and fish compeller, the Pike. You may ignore him for a time, but sooner or later your rod will stiffen, your line thicken, and you will think of the lesser peoples but as flunkies or heralds, or at the best as introductory friends to the great man. For his sake you will be loaded up unmurmuringly like a Commissariat camel, or a Breton ass. You will forget your se- dentary habits and develope calf and thigh muscles. You will study the unlit muddy treatises of hack tipsters and thumb the cata- logues of deceitful vendors. Tyrant ! whom I serve with scarcely a murmur. I buy thy 112 A Charge of Pike flesh at a shilling a pound, as it might be salmon, but yet how cheap it is, for health and joy are given in. The smiles of nymphs, the flash of the water, and the nodding of the rushes, the uproarious appetite which laughs at the flourish of small sandwiches, all these are added to the bargain : such slavery is delicious to me. I wallow in it. Like the tame elephant, I would fain labour to enslave my yet free relatives. Imprimis, the Pike fisher is by a strange paradox the real friend of the finny tribes. It is true he is inclined to sacrifice some, not without piteous unhappiness. But these some are the martyrs of their race, and could they choose, with fulness of knowledge, would assuredly rather die to save their kind from the maw which receives them. Alas ! they cannot know, they only feel : and become martyrs without the crown, that is if here and now is all their spell, which is by no means certain. The poor silvery thing, carrying an armour of hooks round and round, with that pathetic flap, until there dances before his frightened eyes a grim, malicious strenuous death, one wishes that he might just know how his death ends death for so many of his kind, before the great "3 Super Flumina jaws crash upon his sore back and release him. It would turn that inscrutable perse- cuting Providence upon the bank, into a very angel of light, to be loved and worshipped far above the unangling, peevish humanitar- ian. It pleases me to reflect that, when all is known, my Aunt Susan would receive the hearty malediction of the poor little gudgeon, whom she affects to pity and defend ; while we, who use him so brutally as it seems, would be the first to be honoured, if his muteness ever developed into speech in some far-off world. Still, for sheer deliciousness, unshaded by that pathetic problem of pain, spinning must take the first place. The moment when the weeds rot off, or are cut off and flooded away to the sea, is one of the golden mo- ments of the year. Thence, until the fence months begin, and the fresh weeds beggar the spinner of his spoon baits, there is a world of delight to be had, like most other delights, at intervals and in patches. Spin- ning is not to be done every day. It re- quires wind, and a certain shade of water, not that of gin, not of bitter beer, but, if possible, of an outworn green, or a faded peacock blue. Then it requires chosen 114 A Charge of Pike places, an open stretch, and a fairly skilful hand, a long line, and a steady nerve. Given all these requisites, there are few sports so fascinating. As usual, the poets are to be trusted and, that great genius Anon him, I mean, who invented so much about us that is admirable has, not unhappily, voiced the spirit of the thing, in lines not yet set to an equal helpmeet in music. A SPINNING SONG. O the hungry day in March With the roses on the larch ! There are plum buds on the alder, and the black upon the ash. With the river- water green You are neither heard nor seen, For the wind is netting meshes and the ripples gently splash. How the rushes hiss and rattle, And the little catkins prattle ! There are white horse foals a-prancing, just beyond at Bullimore, Those great pipes of waterlilies Seem to hear the stamping fillies, They unsheathe their sweet green scimitars, and lift them up for war. Down the wind with rod and traces To the changeless changing places, With a pocket full of spinners, and a little net and bag ; "5 Super Flumina Just a whisper on the margent, " My device is gules and argent. Yes! and I will follow softly with the spinner that can wag." So we cast afar and follow Where the banks are clear and hollow Ha ! already ? see the rascal is curvetting to the snag. See, he shakes his angry head. Now he's sulky. Now he's led, Quick ! the net below his tail and he tumbles in the bag. So the dappled sunbeams quiver In the woods below the river, So the dark weed sways and stretches like the shadow on his back. Who can dare him ? or discern him In his secret lair ? or turn him In the war dance of his hunger, when his rows of lancets crack ? There is not very much science, perhaps, in spinning for Pike, not more than an ordinary man can learn in a couple of sea- sons. The casting is the principal thing, and that comes only by practice. The rest is just a matter of outfit. You want a twelve- foot lissom rod, a good silken plaited line, and a large reel, a landing net, some gimp traces and spinners. It must be confessed that Pike do not fight very hard. A rush, a plunge, two or three leaps, especially if the 1x6 A Charge of Pike water is shallow, and the bully turns sulky and comes to the surface with a few flaps of protest, and then gives himself up to his fate. The labouring men, when they find a large fish in low water, simply hunt him about with sticks until he sulks, and then pass a noose over him, and hoist him out. But while he fights, say for a quarter-of-an-hour, he certainly fights to win : and if a big jerk can set him free, he will try to obtain it. When there are weeds about, from June till October, and on other days when there is no wind and the water is clear, trolling, or live baiting, is one's substitute for the hap- pier game. The latter is more successful, but one has to play a mulish part, to carry bulky fardels, and to be impassive and even distant. The rod is best laid upon the bank, and the fisherman retires out of sight. The poor little victim dace, or, failing dace, gud- deon or roach, drags round the large float until it disappears with a quiet, but deter- mined plunge. Then you either wait re- strainedly, or strike quickly according as your tackle is snap or gorge. Impatient moderns prefer the former, but your old fashioned rustic-bred angler the latter. Each method has a charm of its own. 117 Super Flumina Snap tackle is, nowadays, a formidable armament. The double triangles are the only sort worth buying. A small hook is stuck into the top corner of the gill, and its two larger cooperators hang over the victim's cheek, another is placed in the back fin, and its two companions dangle over the back. The pike seems to aim at the centre of the back in order to numb his prey by his first bite. With good snap tackle the odds are greatly in favour of the angler, pro- vided that the pike will bite. He will assuredly, even if he has lately fed, for it annoys him even to see a fish in dis- comfort or weakness. He regards it as a high moral duty to clear off any such, if it can be done without too great an effort. Indeed he is rightly called a water-tiger, for the tiger obeys a similar law. You might think that a tiger would leap with a roar and an immense bound upon his prey, but that is not his method. He stretches him- self, yawns, and glides out of his bush in front of the beast he means to kill. Before the pause of surprise can be exchanged for action, he has lifted his paw, and tapped the cheek of the ox or deer, and it falls with broken neck and unbroken skin at his feet. 1x8 A Charge of Pike There is something so deliberate and busi- ness-like about it, that it awes one more than a more melodramatic and strenuous method would do. The pike, too, gives a flick with his tail, and lo ! he is in front of his prey. He seems to lurch from side to side, and gnash upon him with deliberate, but unhesitating, concentrated malice. There is a cool, hard stab, an intellectual, determined, unmerciful strength put forth, which seems to us altogether devilish in its power and murderousness. Still we must not misread the book of nature, for it is well such deeds should be done swiftly, and with mastery. A bungling rend would be un- speakably more horrible. When he has gripped his prey the pike turns back to his den, with the same easy motion, unless the hooks have pricked him. Then he may turn flurried or nervous, but it is not until he feels the command of the line that he really gets alarmed. Then sometimes indeed he splashes about, but more often he runs for the weeds, a snag, a stout root, or other protective power, and his compeller has to turn him. If you know the place of course that goes without saying, but if you do not know it, depend upon it 119 Super Flumina that the pike does, and must be thwarted of his will by faith. When you have turned his first big rush, you keep him ambling up and down, until he wearies of such sentinel duty, and his plunges grow weaker, and you can reel him up. You hit him on the head, and extract the hooks with a disgorger, keeping your fingers carefully outside the great jaws. It is strange how hard he can bite. A half-dead two-pounder will take your finger to the bone. Two pounds more and you will be a finger the less. A six-pounder will amputate two of such, and I verily be- lieve that a twenty-pounder is surgeon enough to excise whatever you may have to lose, if his position be but favourable. The thump on the head, too, merely stuns him for a quarter-of-an-hour, and by no means hastens his end. On the contrary, it prolongs his life, for he lies for a time quiet, with closed gill-covers, and if those who neither know nor fear him, handle him in- cautiously, he graduates them swiftly and leaves them masters both of fear and know- ledge for the future. A seemingly better form of snap tackle is the girth snap. The bait wears a brace of triangles, as an ass wears his pannier, but a 120 A Charge of Pike single hook is caught in the back fin. The girth prevents the gear from breaking loose, at the cast : and the enemy has also a choice of seven hooks, which the Rabbins tell us is the perfect number, and therefore more likely to obtain a blessing. Besides this, we know that the fewer pricks given to the bait the better both for mercy, and business. Was it not the Iron Duke who tried to bind on the bait with elastic bands ? Out of humble imitation of him I have lost many valuable and rare dace, until his memory becomes odious to me. I have even, at times, welcomed Heine's views of his buckram character, and haphazard attainments. Let not the less precise reader aim at being a Wellington. We cannot all bend the bow of Ulysses : and our lines of Torres Vedras would be punctured as readily as if they were pneumatic tyres. But to return to our pike. He is the only fish who is capable of Gothic romance. He loves. He is constant. He lives with one wife, not only in the springtime, when a young Jack's fancy lightly turns upon thoughts of love, but daily throughout the year. Like the Provengal troubadours the lover seems to desire a great lady. He is 121 Super Flumina but a page himself. Madame is of a lordlier, larger build. When you take the happy lovers, one outscales the other often by many pounds. The lesser is Corydon, the lumpier Phyllis. Can it be that the ideals of Girton are realized in this watery world, and that woman will only marry when she may command ? Will she only love those who may be obliged to obey, who can at a pinch be even devoured ? She treats her swain with a careless indifference, too. She chooses the home. She leads him up dykes and ever narrowing gullies, where it is even wonderful that so large a lady should dare to go. He has to follow at all risks, and the pickerels often find themselves cut off from the main stream because of her rash de- cisiveness. He is but a moon to her majesty, just Mrs. So-and-So's husband, her junior and her inferior. What do the large males do for wives ? They are, it is to be feared, morose bachelors, solitary, disillusioned, misogynist and chaste. My cousin Hilda, infected with some slight smattering of metempsychosis, thinks that it is a merciful deliverance for these sad bulky bachelors to be caught and freed from this Amazonian world of theirs. The large and triumphant ladies, she con- 122 A Charge of Pike siders, deserve to be caught away from their upstart position, and so we keep happy festival, when either of them comes into our baskets. The poor husband too, one can but suppose, is liable to divorce, if he grows too fast. The lady will exchange him for a smaller one, if he does not limit himself in meats. She demands absolute fidelity, but supplies only that which is relative. In all these matters, we might easily see that some of our advanced women could be trans- formed into pike in their next incarnation without very much spiritual dislocation. In June the pike is coy. The bashfulness which with us precedes matrimony, with them follows that estate. The matches per- haps upon the terms indicated are not exactly happy. The ditch water must be a poor and unhealthy tipple. Languor invades them. They are lank and squeamish. A ramping dace is small temptation. The spinner has no more attraction than the spinster. It is a month of despondent and morbid moods. Perhaps a diet of juicy water babies, a change of stream, a few weeks in swifter waters, under aerating weeds, is required to give them tone and hope once more. Their lives grow happier as the harvests ripen, and 123 Super Flumina about the end of August they have more Han de I'dme. Still one must live, even if one is melancholic and cynical, and a luscious frog, or roachlet, is sweet to clean jaws, even if one takes it with the don't-care-if-I-do nonchalance of the earthly millionaire. The frog is tied on with silk, head down- wards and he swims away from the rod which shepherds him. Some people will use him more than once. But this is hardly honourable. When a live bait has done his best, has endured risks, and made sacrifices, it is but fair play to release him. The honourable angler is grateful, not only to his riparian hosts, but to his mute helpmates. He thanks them, by acknowledging that they have earned their liberties, when their service is over and it is some consolation to unsuccess to set free the minnow and watch the frisk of intelligence with which he scampers away. He at least has no doubt that life is worth living, and as you follow him with your eye you can shoulder your pack and mutter " Teach me half the gladness that thy soul must know." Large pike in open waters are, of course, large because they are very well educated 124 A Charge of Pike in wariness. Folk say that such will take a duckling, a dead chick or sparrow, a mouse, or a champagne cork covered with the skin of a calf tail, and tricked out with a boot- lace tail and buttons for eyes. A more certain fact is that none of these things, nor any others that the wit of man will devise, ensure a run. A man of a cautious and sanguine temperament, who goes often, and tries many things, is more likely to catch a monster and to have some temporary glory in the local press than one who visits the streams but seldom and then has but few tricks. But you never know. There is a fable of the fox and the cat. The ways of Nature are not for mere man to bet about. Let him take success with gentleness and abate swearing at his failures. He may be a little cast down at the end of the day and say, as he looks at his lank bag, with the dejected Shelley, " How sweet did any heart now share in its emotion." But yet, let him turn further, and he will soon be consoled : " And in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine, Green cowbind and the moonlight-coloured May, ****** And nearer to the river's trembling edge " 125 Super Flumina Perfect epithet ! " There grew broad flag flowers, purple prank t with white, And starry river buds among the sedge, And floating water-lilies, broad and bright, Which lit the oak that overhung the hedge With moonlight beams of their own watery light ; And bulrushes, and reeds of such deep green As soothed the dazzled eye with sober sheen."* " That is all very well," says the impa- tient angler, " but after I have spent so much time and money." There he is wrong. He ought to spend the time. It will keep him from business, and so is well spent : but not much money. Instead of that noble guinea greenheart, with appendices, and all to match, he ought to have bought a stout bamboo for a shilling. They are common enough, being used to pack cargoes in ship's holds. On to this he should have whipped about a dozen snake rings, with fine waxed twine, for which fourpence is outlay enough. The top should have a movable ring, wired on with copper whipping and the smaller end of the rod should be judiciously strength- ened also. A couple of stout rubber rings will hold on the reel and a piece of lead The Question. 126 A Charge of Pike must be inserted in the butt, in order to balance the whole rod to his hand. A few bits of sealing wax dissolved in spirit will protect the dressings, and with a little care and wit the man may have a fine rod, joyful to carry and obedient to his wishes for half- a-crown. The reel perhaps had better cost him thrice that sum, and the line must also be a good one, for it is not made for child's play. The float, trace, landing net and bait hooks, must meet local needs, but, on the whole, thirty shillings ought to be expendi- ture enough to catch sixty jack and pike, or even twice that number. The pike is said to eat twice his weight of food every week : and allowing that the frogs, snails, worms, rats, birds, and other small deer, form half his rations, it is no exaggeration to suppose that he eats his own weight of fish every seven days. A ten- pounder thus demolishes 520 pounds of fish in the year ; and the great monsters of the record would do away with a ton at the least. Few things give one such a sense of the abundance with which the waters bring forth, as to discover that at least a pair of jack are to be found in every decent pool and bend, in the pikey streams. If you take 127 Super Flumina them, their places are not vacant for long. Just as the city man is zealous to find an eligible site on the Surrey side of London ; just as the moment death, or bankruptcy or the police, cause him to leave his desirable mansion, it is snapt up by a rival ravager, so the pike family take one another's tenancies with zeal and swiftness. How do they know that there is a vacant pool, or an unoccupied lair at the commanding corner ? It is a great mystery, but we may partly guess that the advertising agents are the quarry them- selves. Old so-and-so is taken by a spoon bait, and his wife joins him in the realms above. The edible inhabitants feel relief. They browse where their masters once digested their relatives and ancestors. They spread themselves down stream and the next pike notices that a chain of banquets is let down from the higher pool. " Good heav- ens!" they exclaim, "Could this be, if old so and so yet survived ? Would he have allowed this foolish fat thing to drift down to our pool ? " He comes to see either out of curiosity, or reason, or on some hunting expedition. The former tenant is gone and has left his furniture and effects, his stock and fowl yard. The door is open and the 128 A Charge of Pike new tenant stops to breakfast, then to dine, and finally to take full possession. A day is often enough to make the discovery known, and in two days the angler may look for new tenants by the deserted reed bed. Some- times a place will be taken in half-an-hour, with the trout family ; but then trouts are a swiftly moving people. Your pike is a heavy father, conservative in politics, and disinclined to move unless the advantages are obvious. The trout is an Athenian : the pike a Spartan. Give him a week to make sure, and you will find that he has taken the place, which your rod has made to let. His first shyness will have worn off and he though of course one ought to put the word she as the family representative will be prepared to do the honours of the house, as his (or her) predecessor did them. Suffice it to say in conclusion that Master Fuller in his Worthies gives the palm to Lincolnshire, as the mother of pikes. If so the author desires the better acquaintance of that blessed part and would be willing to accept any position of leisure and emolument near Witham, the headquarters of pikery, if other candidates are not to be found ready for such a post. 129 CHAP. VIII The Dashing Dace. HOW seldom it is that the hour and the man are found pre- cisely together in some great emergency. The hour arrives, but alas ! the man has gone for his holidays : or the man is there but the hour never strikes for him, or, worse, strikes when his head is grey, his nerve shattered and his loins stiff with lumbago. It is the same with pike fishing. You fix the date and a hundred events checkmate your intentions. You put off your pressing engagements, evade your duties, make ingenious excuses to your friends, and then the weather spills you, just as you are ready to start. Or worse still, the local netsman who promised you a kettle of live bait, with protestations from the bottom of his blue-jersied heart, sends up at the last minute to tell you that he could find none, or that they have been eaten by the cat, or have died while he left a message (at the tavern) on his way to your tank. You have to start your day by catch- 130 The Dashing Dace ing for yourself, and there is the rub. To take a dace is far harder, than to find a pike with him when taken. You see the merry fellows dappling the water, catching minute flies under your very nose, but how to get one is a problem, in summer when the sun is high. He flouts the humble worm. A few gentles on the gravel will sometimes solicit him not in vain, if you have them and are near a place where you can approach him softly, but you are unlikely to be near such obliging waters. The artificial fly may seduce him in the evening, but he is hardly to be taken in by these ingenious sophistries on a bright summer day. Besides it is adding to a heavy burden to take a fly rod out, as well as a mule's burden of tackle and heavy rods. Gudgeon will bite a small brandling on the bottom, if you can find any gudgeon about, which you can when you are not in need of them, but gudgeon have not the flash and flicker and romance of the dace. Those lucky fellows, who haunt the Thames can set a tiny float down stream, with a brace of gentles six inches below it, and secure the tender bleak quite readily. But most rivers have no such blessing and even if they had Dom Pike prefers a dace, and Super Plum in a the dace is sturdier. Those tender bleak die upon the smallest provocation. They are but half embodied spirits anyhow, just faery things with a thin covering of mortality, and almost too poetic to carry an armoury of grossly combative snaps. The athletic gudgeon is too dark of hue to be a prime bait, but the dace is designed to attract. He spills the light about. He is much in evidence in pikeland, but his saucy swiftness secures him from the mouths which water after him, when he is free. This makes him all the more grateful as a bondsman. If only he were as easy to catch, as he is to see, the problem would soon be solved. The best way to take dace on bright days is by natural fly. It is ignominious, but you had better come down to it, first as last. A few blue-bottles from the window panes, or house flies in a tiny phial, should be set aside, with providence. Otherwise you will rush over the meadows with the landing net after insects. Your temper, soured by failure and the hot sun, will outrun your legs. You rustle the hawthorns, and tiny moths tumble out by fifties, but alas ! they pass through your meshes with easy disdain. You catch butterflies, which the dace despise. Some- 132 The Dashing Dace times you are on the track of a green drake or a winged ant. Hat and hand at last bring him to book, but you have flattened him, when you get him. A silvery moth at last rewards you, and you float him out. Dab, snap, ripple, and the dace has robbed you of the fruit of twenty minutes athletic exercise. Happy, then, is the man who has a store of blue-bottles by him. He seats himself behind a tussock or a tree and floats his dainty upon the tide with a yard or two of fine gut and a tiny hook. The dace are delighted. So is the angler. His empty kettle sings, as the little fellows chase one another round it, and soon the paternoster descends with a couple of them just where the old sentinel is likely to observe them. Do not splash if you can help it, but leave the pike unscared and the bait just near a corner. Reeds, water lilies, a back reach, a fine submarine jungle, a little drift weed and a highway for little fishes, these are what the pike look out for. The dace is an intelligent fish. If pike are near he will do his best to move your line and lead, but he is not fond of hiding. A frightened perchlet tangles himself in weeds, but a dace tries first to bolt along Super Flumina the open country. He is the hare of the river, not given to burrowing, but built for swiftness. Look at his fair proportions, his finely tapering form. That blaze of silver which shines out on the grass, when looked at from below against a clear sky must be very hard to see at all, when the water laps and furrows and curves over the stones. When he sinks, his darker back needs an heron eye to distinguish him from the green wrack and amber pebbles. He is audacious but yet quick to seek safety in flight, and his flight is sustained. His amazing impudence and invulnerable merriment must make him a great trial to the temper of his pikish enemy, and therefore when he is to be had at a disadvantage authority has to be reas- serted. Imagine a powerful bishop. He has been stung by some smart young writer. He has been made ridiculous by the para- graphs of that irresponsible wit. Even the prebendaries and canons-in-residence have smirked and sub-chuckled at the amusing sentences. Dignitaries detest ridicule worse than refutation. All of a sudden the smart offender is upon his knees. He is among the crowd of meek and obsequious candi- dates for Orders, or for Licences, or suing The Trashing T)ace for tit-bits from the episcopal side dishes. Can any human bishop be so far above the revenges of the world, as not to fall upon the luckless little wag ? Will he not plough, inhibit, deny, chasten or expose him now? The wretch falters upon the Kenosis. He has scamped Butler. He would make havoc of the cure. He is a flippant and an unevan- gelical heresiarch. Business, pleasure, duty, and delight, determine the heavy prelate. He is hot foot for massacre and his momen- tum (weight multiplied by velocity) is awful to behold. Such is the Right Reverend the Pike, when he sees your dace within his reach. He may have fed to repletion already, but insolence must be chastised and he mouths the helpless flouter with undisguised satis- faction. Sir John FalstafF is quite right " a young dace is the bait for an old pike," and none other for choice. Let him be young too. Indeed your catch is almost in inverse proportion to your bait. A half-pound dace may get you only a pound Jack, and vice versa. The dace is a very game fish. He fights as fiercely as if he were at least a trout. He will break, whatever his weight can break, and he has nothing invalidish, melancholy or 135 Super F I urn in a despairing about him. Even when he is but an inch long, he has a quick eye and a well- balanced athletic poise. What happens to him, when he gets old ? Can he get old ? He is surely a Greek. Wordsworth tells us that the old age of the blackbird is " beauti- ful and free." An aged blackbird sprinkled with grey round his poll, hoarse and iterative in note, his tawny orange bill faded into a withered yellow can be imagined. But an aged dace, all head and leanness, no man can imagine. These children of the sun have no tenacious hold upon life. Their silver suits cannot be tarnished and oxydized, for they would lay them by first, I imagine. Yet dace will live in captivity for long, but you must keep the water fresh and sweet. A pond will not do for them unless there is a current through it. They avoid scum. Rotten weeds make them sickly, at least they will not live, when caught in that septic time. Dace can be tamed a little, and will rise to welcome the hand which offers the ant's egg or crumb, but such close familiarity with the little water poet is disturbing to the mind. It prevents one from saying with the old William Lauson in his Comments on the Secrets of Angling (1653) : " Pray to God 136 The 'Dashing T)ace with your heart to bless your lawful exer- cise," for one cannot know the dace too intimately, and be his friend and admirer, and yet deliver him the poet the child of light, into the jaws of the Philistine pike. Not that he is a merciful fish. He lives by bold rapine and the whole destruction of delicate gauzy things, each of which in his turn, no doubt, takes his span of life with zest. It is perhaps unreasonable to pity him too deeply and inharmoniously. But yet pain and death, which seem native and proper for solemn coxcombs, for your inso- lent, gaudy, spruce perches, who bayonet their way through the river thoroughfares, appear inapposite for the gay, dancing, humorist dace. His life is a comedy and too frivolous for tragedies. It is an airy, tip- toe, flibberty-gibbet existence. But nature has not exempted him from the common lot. His suit of silver crumples, as easily as if he were a groping, smoky tench, or a sooty loach. We must use him, as we are ourselves used. Perhaps the larger love is more justified by use than by our partial knowledge and squeamish sentimentality. Some people will, if they find a worm on the path move it away. Others tread upon Super Flumina it and pass on. The former seem the kinder until one knows that the worm which leaves its haunt by day is in mortal sickness, tor- tured by parasites, eaten alive by lesser worms. He has come out to crave death, and the man who spares him condemns him to new agonies. These things are an allegory, and the moral is that we are cruel, when we are too kind, and hurt when we are too anxious to spare. So let us use the dace as noble men would wish to be used, and sacri- fice him for honest ends. Some folk may prefer to take him by artificial flies, and these perhaps will accept a few hints upon the subject. There is no general rule at all in the matter. The dace refuses to be reduced to an arithmetical calculation. Those of one river flout the customs of their brethren in the next watershed. The gunsmith will say black gnats, red gnats, palmers, or blue- bottles. It is, perhaps, not amiss to have every sort, but patient experiment alone will give you the key to the mystery. When you have tried a dozen sorts in vain, you put on a March Brown, in August say, and the dace snap it as fast as you can present it. A coachman, a red spinner, a white moth, 138 The 'Dashing T)ace or a jenny spinner, will sometimes excite them to languish and longing, but, on the whole, you had better begin with the small- est cochlabondhu you can find. If they are rising at all, and refuse to look at it, after a dozen suggestions, change it. They are, of course, less particular in the evening, but then the pike have finished work for the day, and your catch will coldly furnish you with bait for a to-morrow which may never come. Trout are not nearly so coy and nice in their appetites, whatever their admirers may pre- tend. If a trout can be got to rise at the ninth application, the dace will not rise till the twelfth. But, as the French general said to encourage the negro officer, Eh bien ! Contmuez / The last fly in your book may be the very fly which our friend desires. In the evening it is best to try the olive dun first : but in broad day the natural bait saves time and temper on the whole. So small, but yet so evasive ! So common, but yet so hard to find ! There is something almost elfin about this fascinating and baffling little fellow, that puts one on one's mettle. For two hours I have been at him without one single relaxing pause, and an old and crafty angler has been advising me all the time in Super Flumina a stage whisper, from behind a blackberry screen. We pause for lunch, and laugh at our unhandy efforts. See, here is a sherry flask. We cannot catch him, but we will drink his health, and pay him some generous tribute. A HEALTH. To the saucy dace Who refuses fly, With his frolic face And his eager eye. He dapples the picture Framed in green Of the great white clouds With the blue between. The brown trunks tremble, The grasses wave, As he rings the mirror, The merry knave ! See ! he leaps by sixes Some Jack swam up : But he snatches a gnat With a pretty clup ! With a shake he's oft Like a streak of black, It was etched on silver, But fades alack ! 140 The 'Dashing 'Dace What ho ! Sir Merry, Not that ? not this ? Is there never a dainty Can promise you bliss ? Here comes a ripple And there a calm, But he simply passes Without alarm. So sure in fleetness, So pertly wise, He seems for sweetness From alien skies. We praise and laugh For he has no match, We can love and long, But we cannot catch. Till lo ! at last I have found his lure, Lo ! he leaps up bold, And we make him sure. Else doubts arise, As I whip and sing. No fish glides by But a faery thing. What an eery motion And easy way ! Tis a cherub's gait, But the heart of a fay. 141 Super Flumina Dace are by no means to be scorned as table fish. How could they fail to be sweet eating, when their own tastes are so pellucid and aerial ? A fine dish of them fried in delicate fats, as soon as the happy angler comes home, make a royal banquet, with a suspicion of vinegar, a little cress, and some brown bread and butter. You could not do better, believe me, if they were troutlets which hissed and spat in the pan. A little white wine Chablis shall we say goes well with them. Indeed, there is a proper vintage for every kind of fish that swims, but to en- large upon this theme would be either to speak to ears too gross to understand it, or else it would be to insult the fine spirits to whom this knowledge is native and instinc- tive. The meditative angler, especially while he is trying some new fetch for the girlish dace, may do well to reflect that the fish reflect not insignificantly the types of his acquaint- ance. Is not this little dace, like lively young Dashling, who coxed the Queen's eight? I see the very man inpiscate. He ran and boxed too, did Dashling, far beyond his inches, and if I remember rightly, be- came an explorer in Africa, where he was 142 The 'Dashing "Dace eaten of lions. This pushing, practical perch in my basket, reminds me of Dollard- son, in his rich waistcoats, whom none could ignore or forget. He took a good degree, and became a barrister, renowned for his bullying and sharp cross-examinings. Poor old Dough, now the mild-eyed, perpetual curate of Ramsbotham Minor, who lived in cheap lodgings in Walton Street, and be- longed to the unattached, he was a good, but timid roach. He hated extremes did Dough, and had a sad earnestness about him. That wide-eyed fellow, we always thought so lacking in taste Fallowfield, of Lincoln, I mean also took Orders and everything else he could get : he was actually made chaplain to Lord Earlscourt, and is now a rotund Canon in the wilds of somewhere. He is the very embodiment of a chub, a two-pound chub. Sallow old Heavyside the solicitor, a quiet family man, with a thick ring and stupid sons, he is a tench. He ought to have been a physician by rights, but he fattens upon his diet of deeds. Call upon him at his office and see him slowly grope in the twilight among his despatch boxes. How he rubs his fat fingers along the red tape ! Beckling of the blue blood, Super F/umina the dandy, became a soldier and perished magnificently before his day in some frontier scuffle : he had the dash of a gallant trout about him. The walrus, as we called little Gregson, because of his huge moustache and solemn bearing, ought to have been the gudge- on. He got taken on at Christie's, and dab- bles a good deal in Art criticism, taking him- self over-seriously. Large Longleat became anArmy Contractorand promoted companies. His grin, and those hard eyes, proclaimed him a jack, when he was young. He is now a pike, as his admirers will admit. Cecil Rhodes was much taken with him, and sent a lot of good things his way, which he did not let slip. You, my kind round- eyed Sir, with the cocked hair, made me wonder if you were ever a rock whiting. Painful Higgins, you have assuredly the as- pect of a blenny. Forbes, you long-bodied rowing champion, you Ireland scholar and king of good fellows, you are a salmon even to your love of prawns and self-sacrifice. I could easily believe that your flesh would be pink, if some Shylock carved out a pound of it. There is no fish that swims, but has his counterpart in the human brotherhood. Even the ladies have their likenesses in the 144 The 'Dashing 'Dace watery world. Do I not know the pretty dapper pilot fish ? The matronly bream ? Even alas ! the grave-eyed sting ray from Madras, and the Hag (Myxine) from the German Ocean ? The last, one is not sur- prised to find, are " frequently found buried in the abdominal cavity of other fishes, es- pecially gadoids, into which they penetrate to feed upon their flesh. When caught they secrete a thick glutinous slime in incredi- ble quantities, and are therefore considered by fishermen to be a great nuisance, seriously interfering with the fishing in localities where they abound." But ladies are less like fishes than birds, as a rule, and it is only the coarser sex who can be successfuly depicted in the aquarium. Most men will assure one confidently that dace can easily be caught on some one par- ticular fly. A lieutenant in the Artillery caught three dozen, magnified into five dozen, on one blue upright, some years ago. He proposed to repeat that feat, but not a dace would look at his lure, though he flung it where their circles intersected like the diagram of first proposition of Euclid. An expert angler from Evans' Bank pledged his honour upon the virtues of the Golden Super Flumina Sedge, as a never failing recipe. Alas ! when he forsook the counters of Mammon for the water edge, the fly was as fruitless as if it had been a champagne cork. Could it have been that the name sounded sweet to the fiscal ear ? Young Mr. Attenborough, F.R.C.P., was positive that red palmers and Cinnamons were the only cue. We flecked half-a-mile of stream with these flocules, but never a dace arose until after six o'clock, when they will rise to anything in reason. It is vain to generalize from one successful bout, and the mid-day fly, which will be cer- tain to catch them has not yet been hatched in Redditch, or the North Country. This view is not gloomy, but merely sober. On the other hand, have we not known the fitful little creatures relish April dainties in July ? and October flies in August ? The fact is that the dace has a fine queazy taste, a nice- ness of appetite, and a whimsical love of strange dishes. An impromptu feather -fly, cut out with pocket nail-scissors, and whip- ped on with a frayed hat ribbon, is some- times not unwelcome. Even so, fastidious guests at an aspiring little dinner will ask for some familiar savoury, which is new- dubbed with a mock French name and clapt 146 The 'Dashing T)ace into the entremets, whereas in nude Eng- lish terms they would think it indecent even to mention that familiar viand. Indeed, the rogueries of a good hostess will suggest methods to the contemplative seeker after dace, which only need leisure and a bold application. Here is all fulness, ye brave, to reward you. Whip and despair not. The last fly may give the dace to the bait-can. But if they all fail, whip a gentle on a No. 12 crystal hook as if he were a fly : a chrysalis gentle will do. But if you are in haste for bait it saves time to begin with this course. CHAP. IX Perches and Plants. AMONG other distinguished liter- ary anglers we must not forget the poet Pope, who writes about Lord Cobham's house, (Stowe) that he spent every hour there but dinner and night " fishing, no politics, no cards, nor much reading." What a golden recipe for that asthmatic venomous great man ! If he had spent as many weeks there as he tarried days he need not have died at fifty-six of the asthma. But he angled too late, both for his disease and his severities, to obtain much relief. The Dunciad, in its last recension was being typed. It was the year 1743, the poet's last year of life, for he died in May, 1744, arguing to the last for the immortality of his great crippled soul. Did he catch little pond carp or what ? Did he soon weary of the sport ? The rod must have tired his delicate, white little hands, so apt and tireless with rods of another kind. A lake, a river, (with an ornamental bridge) were to be found among clipped yews, rec- 148 Perches and Plants tangular lines, Corinthian and Ionic columns, parterres, flower-gardens, an orangery, foun- tains and statues. What chance could there be for angling in these artificial surround- ings ? They are almost its antithesis. And what distracting pictures to lure one back to the microbes of indoor life ! Rembrandts, Cuyps, Salvator Rosas, a Domenichino, por- traits of Cromwell, Charles II, Nell Gwynne in yellow and blue, John Locke, Shake- speare, with Charles Edward's sash and Prin- cess Mary's hair, which Henry VIII had pulled, Louis XII played with, and Charles Brandon had worshipped. Grecian valleys, pebble alcoves, cascades, artificial ruins, urns, hermitages without hermits, fanes of pastoral poetry and the like, we may laugh at it all, and indeed, it is almost inconsistent with the high strenuousness of sport : but yet that straitened, formal, ceremonious, stately life, has much to say for itself. It was well-knit and well-braced, and neither soppy nor floppy. Loungers may sneer at Pope, but his polished shafts pierce through the de- fences which their casual stones cannot even reach. A generation which forgets Pope, or dismisses him as a vapid ceremonialist in letters, may chance to meet him redivivus in 149 Super Flumina some ruinous day, when an unexpected at- tack will declare irrefutably the power of discipline over mere laxity, and he will again tattoo moral maxims upon our dis- dainful hides. Pope must not be forgotten, nor the scorner too easily scorned, " Sooner let earth, air, sea, to chaos fall, Men, monkeys, lap-dogs, parrots, perish all ! " and that includes, mark you, the whole non- angling community. Pope's first poetic ang- ling venture is Windsor forest, 1713. Until further evidence be forthcoming, we can conclude not only that the great Alexander Pope was, up to his lights, an angler, but that he caught perch, because of the times of year and of day in which he angled, and also because there are abundance of these fishes about Stowe. But chiefly because there is something gorgeous, pseudo-classic and tren- chant about both Pope and perches. They dwell in the same department of the mind most harmoniously. The Master of Stowe how hard it is to quit the place ! was Temple, Lord Cobham, one of Marlborough's generals, and still more remarkable for begetting Pope's phrase, " your ruling passion strong in death." He ^Perches and Plants did not die calling upon Heaven to save his country, as the poet prophesied. On the contrary, his last act was to fling a glass of jelly in his niece's face, but possibly she had railed against angling, in which he took much delight. If so, it is to be hoped that he did not miss his last mark, albeit, one could have wished him a finer end. But to return to perches. If you have ever stood outside Cannon Street Station or on London Bridge, between eight o'clock and ten, on a week-day morning, you will have seen a school of perch incarnate. A set of well-dressed men, all of one livery, pour out from the stations, their faces all set one way. They sweep along, glancing from side to side as they go, with that nervous preda- tory glance, which only fears to miss some- thing pounce-worthy. If you could but trail a piece of scrip, say across their line of march, how they would circle round, wheel and follow it ! If they did not notice it, or if they felt no interest in the thing, knowing either too much or too little about it, the golden hour would soon pass and they would all be away in their offices their weed beds and your chance would be gone until the evening, when the same school, Super Flumina perhaps less spry and swift of foot, recrosses the same bridge or street, pours into its engulfing arches, and is seen no more till next day gives forth the old serious intent crowd, and so, da capo, three hundred days, in the year. There come and go the same faces slowly getting greyer, the same feet beat the same flags as this day and hour last year. Perhaps they fall a shade more heavily upon them, until they fall out. The man has made his pile, or else gone down to stay somewhere near Woking. His place is filled immediately and after a week no one mentions him again. Regret ? Far from it. There is one large mouth the less to be fed, and a living is too hard to make for any sentiment towards our competitors, other than a hard cut-and-thrust jostling sentiment. Let not the lounger sneer at this crowd. They are not any of them fools and by no means all of them knaves. Indeed they are creatures of immense power and simplicity of habit. If you know a bait which takes one, you can get a dozen or a gross with the same. They are not scared by the loss of their familiars. They are bold biters and burly Britishers, fond of society, but capable of doing without it. Capable, that is pre- 152 'Perches and 'Plants eminently the perch word and the city man's word, too. Where a school of perch have passed, you might examine the river bed with microscopes and not see one attainable morsel of food left behind. Every small, edible thing that cannot escape in time is cleared up. These men, and these fishes, inspire one with awe. They have the dili- gence of the successful generals. War and business are two sides of one idea. Organi- sation and government, dominance and in- telligence, these are not things to be sniffed at. They are not vulgar qualities nor cheap ones. The great pike knows better than to despise perches. On the contrary he is anxious to be thought of by them as neutral. He respects the waspish colour, the armoured back and the pointed gill covers of very moderate sized perch. The wise man does not rail against men of 'capacity in any walk of life, for no fool, or loiterer, or undis- ciplined person, can ever be capable in any trade, even that of a burglar. It is true that the Nemesis of determination is often a hard narrowness, a certain coarseness if you like, but these are separable accidents. Without the strenuousness of these men of business, how unutterably sloppy all life and Super Flumina thought would grow ! There is something honourable in itself, something that in the end makes for a more honourable social life, in these well-knit forward fellows. In- capacity is their enemy, as it is the enemy of all that is good and true, whether in men, or nations, or rivers. There is no finer sport than perch fishing on a fine October day. Let there be a slight frost at night and a clear sky overhead, as befits the character of the quarry. Scour the worms well in moss and find a good deep hole. Use a large sharp hook, filed for the occasion, and keep oft the bottom. A paternoster with minnows is a more certain way to take the larger fish. The angler should, of course, make the pater- noster himself, and not buy one. A couple of yards of stout gut, with a pear-shaped lead at the bottom, and three hooks upon bristles, six inches apart, are the best equip- ment. You drop this achievement noise- lessly into the holes, keeping well out of sight. Your rod is stiff and the line taut. You will not need to wait for very long before you feel the welcome tug, tug, that heralds a fish. If you are in the middle of the city rush, and not merely meeting a Terches and Plants ' rogue ' perch, you will have a busy half hour and then possibly one or two fish at intervals, but not again that fierce rapture of sport, which actually gives no time to basket the red and gold. They leap about unheeded on the grass in a confused semi- circle, while their brethren are being caught as fast as the line can be worked. Anything that calls itself a worm seems welcome to them. A black marsh, a red-ringed brand- ling from the dunghill, a pink-nosed crystal, a fat lob, even a yellow-tailed jagtail or a green worm a sort of herb cheese is swallowed without so much as a preliminary taste. This seems gluttonous and foolish. What a poor diner the perch must be, you will say, if one food is much the same as another to him. But remember that he dines surrounded with competitors of the most advanced individualist type. Imagine such a party of ultra-individualist American persons at a banquet. There is no choice between pheasant and woodcock. Eat the thing that is nearest, or you will be left to dine off mustard and discarded parsley and the frills of the ham. Bolus or starvation, that is the sorry choice. It is hard not to believe that the worm which is thus bolted Super Flumina is not in some quiet aftertime brought back to the defrauded palate, ruminated in fact. In the summer the perch goes to business so impossibly early in the morning, that it is almost a counsel of perfection to say ' shake off dull sloth ' and go out to meet him. Most men have to compromise and try the inferior hour of four p.m., or the sunset aftermath of larger fish. Perch seem to be the most astrological of the fishes. They are perhaps more influenced by the moon than are any others, unless possibly chub. They bite best on the days that follow the mooniest nights, and worst when the nights are darkest. Can it be that excessive attention to business makes their wits a little unstable and lunatic ? or did their remote ancestors feed more heavily at the flood than at the neap tides ? It would be interesting to learn from our city anglers whether those mysterious and hu- morous columns of the newspapers which they scan so eagerly in trains, shew any similar variations. Is tallow easier ? Are light hogs steadier, and is lead any lighter and brisker, as Cynthia grows rounder in the face ? The markets might thus be related to the perch pool by this celestial nexus, and 156 Perches and Plants he who angled with success on Saturday, might speculate with equal success on Monday. The rustic, far from the whirl of Change, might thus hold at the tip of his magic rod the secret as to whether bear or bull will prevail, and whether inflation or depression is to be the order for to-morrow. There are some who still believe in spin- ners for perch. These must plead for their own beliefs, but let them not argue from reservoirs and ponds to rivers and open waters. Magnets, kill-Devons, quill min- nows, spirals, and hairy things with revolving heads may do well in the former, but they have to check their proud flights and grovel to the humble worm, or the living minnow, where food is plentiful and experience wider. Hunger and curiosity and an uneducated re- mote life will prompt both fish and men to hazard much for what is new and strange. But let either be fairly fed, moderately well travelled, and a little urbane in everyday things, and they will not be caught by specious advertisement. The gold mine which fires the imagination of the country fox hunter provokes the Mincing Laner and even the Tottenham Court Roadster merely to derision. Super Flumina An uncertain pursuit, as it makes men diffident, non-dogmatic, prone to receive ideas and non-aggressive in character, so it is apt to engender superstition. The angler, like the gambler, the hop grower, the pearl diver, the Australian squatter, the literary man, the sailor, the horse breeder, and others, because of their small defence against mis- carriage and bad fortune, have this tentative habit of mind, and are the prey of omens, superstitions and quaint fanciful notions of co-relation, which are entirely unknown to the butter merchant, governor general, pavier, clerk of the works, and in fine to all men of assured income, especially with com- fortable circumstance. Give a man any sort of protective awning and storm-proof habi- tation and he will become assured, dogmatic, a scorner of the delusions and superstitions which haunt the majority. He will bask in the siccum /umen, which comes to him filtered through his coverings. He will be impatient of what is inexplicable and mystic. He will be certain that what cannot be ex- plained and revealed can be explained away and denied. The bright rays of the study lamp clear up all those, possible, and, perhaps, things, which mere sunlight and star beams 158 and Plants leave still mysterious. If such philosophers will condescend to hear a confession, it shall be made without extenuation or denial, but with a bashful consciousness of folly. But let such remember the golden rule for hear- ing confessions given by John Myrc (1450) in his instructions to parish priests, modern- ized thus : " Still as a stone then that thou sit And keep thee well that thou ne spit Cough thou not then thy thanks Nor wring thou not with thy shanks Lest he suppose thou make that fare For loathing that thou hearest there But sit thou still as any maid Till that he hath his all ysaid." The good confessor will even encourage the penitent by saying " Peradventure I have done the same, and considerably much more too " but this last sentiment is hardly to be expected in the laity. The Confiteor is this then. All fish, but particularly perch, bite best upon saints' days, (tut, tut, tut !) Be- ware, too, that no woman wishes you luck, when you set out. Swearing has a bad effect upon fish bites an edifying theory surely ! Also the plants which grow upon the margin will sometimes reveal the likely Super Flumina places for fish. Perch are most often to be found just where the figwort most flourishes. This may be coincidence, but it puzzles one to account for so much coincidence. The figwort does not seem to attract many insects. In fact it is fertilized chiefly by wasps, and though leathery-mouthed chub eat wasps, thin-cheeked perch do not attempt them. Figwort does not grow abundantly in pro- portion to the depth of the water. The deepest pools may be bare of it and a shallow may have a stiff fringe all along the bank. Nor does it like windless reaches better than exposed ones. Perhaps a sunny and warm bit of bank, which curves against the South, gets the advantage of a few degrees to its roots, and that little cosiness may attract the fish and the insects, but the explanation is lame, for it does not always hold, and if true, why should not other fish gather there, as surely as perches ? But what is figwort ? asks the impatient angler. Figwort or brown - wort " springe th up with stalkes four- square, two cubits high, of a darke purple colour, and hollow within : the leaves grow alwayes by couples, as it were from one ioynt, opposite, or standing one right against another, broad, sharpe pointed, snipped 160 Perches and P lants round about the edges like the leaves of the greater Nettle, but bigger, blacker and nothing at all stinging when they are touch- ed : the floures in the tops of the branches are of a dark purple colour, very like in forme to little helmets : then commeth up little smal seeds in pretty round buttons, but sharpe at the end : the root is whitish, beset with little knobs and bunches as it were knots and kernels." Thus Gerarde : and these kernels suggested, by the doctrine of Signatories, the use of figwort against the knots of scrophulous, haemorrhoidal and King's Evil diseases. While we are in the land of the doubtful, let us also ask whether it is quite certain that the pious doctrine of Signatories is entirely foolish as moderns believe ? It is briefly this that the shape and colour of herbs and parts of them, will in- dicate their medicinal properties, e.g. brown- wort roots for strumas, leeks for the bladder, lungwort for spotted lungs, pennyroyal for women, and so on ; God having, as it were, set a mark upon his creatures, which the wise can interpret. Before emptying his cornu- copia of abuse and scorn upon this notion, a scientific man might perhaps just open his Pharmacopseia and notice the many specifics 161 M Super Flumina which were discovered by this illusive theory. It may have been a foolish reason to give celandine for jaundice, because its orange- juice suggested the effect of bile in the skin, but many generations of the jaundiced felt some relief from the treatment. Let not those, at least, who earn most of their fees by dispensing stuffs discovered by this doc- trine, be quite so sharp against their spiritual ancestors, until at least they can better these discoveries by virtues found out upon some more reasonable theory. Of course the danger is great that the language of signs be misinterpreted. The white water-lily for in- stance, what could look more spiritual and pure ? She, or her relatives, are the very flowers of religion. One of them is the Lotus of India, another of Egypt, another the sacred flower of North Australia. Sus- anna of our own Bible was named after a water-lily. Evidently the lovely flower is marked out by high Heaven to promote a temperance and chastity of body, and so Parkinson and others used it. Modern science will have no such matter. You can dye things grey with her pipe-like root branch, or tan with them, but you cannot get a white celestial mood from them, by 162 ^Perches and Plants any carnal chemistry. This is pathetic, and so is this fact, if both ancient and modern observers are to be trusted, the golden lily, (allowed for an astringent), is gradually oust- ing our holy Susan. In the Theatrum JBo- tanicum (1640), you will see that the white lily is commoner than the yellow, whereas Messrs. Bentham and Hooker, in their last edition describe the yellow as being " as common, and in many places more so, than Nymphcea alba" which God forbid it should ever be ! If the perch will not bite at good bait and seasonable time, you may conclude that there is dirty weather brewing, and there is some consolation to be had in observing a few of the commoner water flowers, which a man may enjoy without fancying that he is a botanist or allowing others to calumniate him with this name. Take Arrowhead, for example, which rears his boldy-barbed broad arrow leaves above the stream and has a lovely white Trinity flower, with a purple centre, and a rough burred fruit. He is at present entirely useless, save that an en- thusiast discovered that his tubers tasted, when boiled, like old peas. But what a wall paper he would make ! What crewel 163 Super F I urn in a work ! Why do not some of our designers take to angling instead of everlastingly trading on the old gleanings of those who did ? If they do depict him on panels or walls, will they be kind enough not to make each flower of both sexes, but kindly make the upper ones of the nobler sex, so that the pollen shall remain dry, and the fruit be kept moist ? Another very decorative flower is the Kent flowering rush, the Thames rose, (why Thames ? The Parret rose, the Avon rose, and so on). Why should this, the cousin of the last, circle the world in so much nar- rower a band ? Arrowhead is from the arctic circle to the torrid zone, but this in a mere belt. Why should both have a John- sonian dislike of Scotland ? The loose spray of pale rose flowers with plantain-like leaf is the water plantain, not a plantain at all, of course, but endued, by Pliny and others, with all the virtues of that family. The lesser water plantain is so called by the wiser moderns because its flowers are considerably bigger than those of its sister. It is used for nothing at all since the Victor- ian era, which discovered the aimlessness of most of things created. The benighted Brazilians contrive to make ink out of their 164 ^Perches and ^Plants water plantains ; but what have we to do with such empirics ? Considering how little is really known about the weeds we walk upon, it is not astonishing to find that the weeds we boat upon have attracted such scant study and attention that they are dismissed with short sentences by the botany books. Let us lie upon our stomachs over the bank and peer into the stream. Do you see that dark bank of swelling green ? That is Canada's pre- sent to us, the beautiful but mischievous water thyme, with its small whorls of trans- lucent leaves tucked into the stem. Elodea Canadensis is the creature's name. It came over to Yorkshire in 1847, and is slowly creeping over our quiet rivers. It is too dense for fish, too tart for insects, too bitter for ducks, and too soft and deep for the tools of clearers. Those rich cushions are choking our streams. Why ? Have we not undiscovered wealth enough of water weed ? Ours, at anyrate, are all pock pitted by hungry jaws, but look at this perfect stranger. Nobody bites at him, and he is flourishing when the rest are half rotten. Those long, waving, leafy things, which sway in the stream, with a sort of dry flake 165 Super Flumina in the axil, are the pond weeds. There are thirty of them, without counting foreigners, and that bit of smooth water, held still by flat lancehead leaves, is the swimming pond weed, and a good friend of the fish. Our perch will often hang their strings of eggs under those leaves, where they are safe always to be in the water, be the river high or low, and, if it were not for the ducks, to be fertilized in peace, through the tiny holes which fit none other sperms than those of perch, and so to hatch out into little inky fry, which themselves begin to breed when they weigh a fifth of a pound. That long, green, hairy tress is the Conferva of Pliny. Its name implies that it is good for healing broken bones, (Con/ervere, to knit). We call it flannel wort, and catch roach with it. Those fine, short, fennel leaves belong to the water milfoil, which is of small interest to us, but of enormous joy to the minnows. That bit of bright green wrack is a thing to eye with respect, for it is probably the great grandfather of all the whole vegetable family or most of them. Here is the common ancestor of grass, vines, roses, balm, cab- bages, corn and geraniums, and all those modifications of the green leaf, the water leaf. 1 66 ^Perches and Plants Look into this side ditch, at the mouth of which you can drop your paternoster. That clumsy branched horsetail thing is the Chara, which more than any other plant gives rivers their medicated taste. Before the rascalities of the mosquito were laid bare, that poor creature was charged with causing malaria. He is now acquitted of vice, and robbed of most of his interest, poor unhappy thing. Yet he is of a most ancient family, and granules of green can be observed by microscopists dancing in solemn order between his joints. Those uninterest- ing ribbons of a faded and muddy yellow are the celebrated Vallisneria spiralis, which forms a similar ballroom for granules until the thermometer passes below 45. But its chief manoeuvre is in the spring, when it casts off its male flowers to drift down the stream, or up with the wind, and sends up the female flower by a delicate spiral spring to the marriage market at the surface. The string is then tightened and the fertilized flower descends to the crown to ripen her seeds. This looks as though this plant had once lived partly out of the water and descended below it, for she re- tains both winds and waters as her mes- 167 Super Flumina sengers, though she lives wholly in the domain of the latter. But the perch might bite gentles after all and why not try these ? It is time for them to begin moving. If you see them leap, you can be sure of a good basketful, for they seldom leap, and when they do, are uncommonly sharp set. 168 CHAPTER X ^Angling ^Authors. A DICTIONARY often makes very pretty reading. Where is the man who cannot pass a very smooth hour away over Dr. Johnson ? Literature, though articu- lated, is still sweet. Even those most honourable people who persuade themselves and others that a roll of disjointed texts in waiting rooms will improve our morals and theology are much to be admired. Matthew Arnold pokes pretty fun at Dr. Marsh, their venerable and amiable choryphaeus ; and others have doubted whether the edification justified the cost and the occasional ribaldry with which it is met. Indeed it is grievous to see pious exclamations misused, as for in- stance by the wag who, when annoyed by a legend in the Langport waiting room, to the effect that smoking was strictly pro- hibited, excised and hung under it a post- script from Dr. Marsh, " O, the patience of God's people ! " But the Marshians are right. Literature is needed in waiting-rooms 169 Super Flumina to inform the perfunctorily leisured classes who sojourn there, and to soften the savage morals of those who have just missed their trains. It is a mistake, perhaps, to limit us to such ancient writers, and to maxims of Divinity, even if these were always sound. But whose fault is that ? Let Dr. Marsh be supplemented by other writers. They must be, like him, ejaculatory and concise : like him, fragmentary and not so absorbing that one's ears will be deaf to the arrival of the train and the cries of the porters : like him, pure, and as elevating as time and place will allow : like him, too, of small market value, lest rogues seize and pawn the tools of our advancement. Should we not find much comfort in an Ainsworth's Latin Dictionary at these times ? Or better still, in the Ang- ler's Dictionary, the Bibliotheca Piscatoria f This latter, if kept in a slot machine and ex- tracted by pennyworths, would increase the dividends without doubt. It is well known to booksellers, and indeed was lent me by the prince of them* but deserves much fame. It was compounded by Mr. T. West- wood, an angler, a poet, and a lover of the Sancgreall, as he calls it, and by Mr. Thomas Mr. B. H. Blackwell, of Oxford. Flortat ! 170 Angling Authors Satchell, a writer upon our clownish names for fishes, who publishes with the English Dialect Society. Mr. Satchell, one may guess, was some sib to Mr. W. Satchell the publisher, for the book came from his wallet in Covent Garden in 1883. Give it to any man of sense for five minutes and he will be the richer for ever. " So Leigh Hunt wrote on angling," he will exclaim, " and William Howitt and Miss M. R. Mitford, and James Thompson, and Sir Humphrey Davy, and Du Bartas." What, Phineas Fletcher, Michael Drayton ? Lord Rochester has a short note which might be extended, for the merry monarch was a great angler, and Sidney's diary gives glimpses of him risking his health on days when a dog would not go abroad, to the surprise and sarcasm of his court. To say the honest truth this fact must not be too well bruited, for the enemies of anglers know but too little of this singular and most lovable king. That little is not good. They have heard gossip about his mistresses, and he stands for them as a synonym for lewdness. The pathos of his life, the im- possibilities of his position, the gallant laughter of a man who was bound to dis- appoint all men's hopes, and who mounted 171 Super Flumina and rode for a certain fall, all these things are nothing to them. But while we con- demn adultery, let us not forget charity, even to perplexed kings, and the rulers of distracted, divided and anatomized bodies politic. My aunt Susan will be confirmed in her worst suspicions if she ever hears that King Charles II was one of us. She will ascribe a Nellie and a Duchess at least to each of us, without reflecting that while the king spent his hours by the innocent water- side, John, Earl of Rochester, and others, the anti-anglers, were not exactly redeeming their own time, but were behaving as some anti-anglers have behaved both before and since. Let us cram her with the savoury meats of scandal from the king's opposers. That will bring delight and possibly profit to her peculiar soul. The only drawback to the waiting-room use of this Bibliotheca Piscatoria is that it may extend the vice of covetousness, and blast our blessed contentment. Who, for instance, when he heard of M. (i.e. Master Leonard Mascall), who wrote in black-letter in 1590 a " Booke of Fishing, with Hooke and Line," could fail to hanker for it ? Especially when the hearer learns that he 172 Angling Authors can, with its help, make also engines to take Polcats, Buzards, Rattes and Mice, and to do all such other tricks as delight War- riners ? Lives there a man with soul so dead, who would not like to drive an engine which would take Polecats ? Or, if he can- not mount so high, could he resist knowing from Robert Huish what flies took the finny ancestor in 1838 ? or how Cruikshank with Boleyne Reeves made fun of us in 1841 ? or how Oliver Raymond fished without cruelty in 1866 ? or how a person of honour (the Honourable Roger North) discoursed of ponds in 1714? or how Robert Nobbes trolled in 1682 ? or what rare experiments T.S., in 1614, recommends in Mvs* Jewell for Gentrie ? or what certaine experiments John Taverner made in 1600 ? As we turn over the dangerous leaves, and note the dates, it is hard not to wish to know some of the men who walked serenely beside the quiet rivers of England, while arms clashed, kingdoms reeled, theologians wrangled, churches rose and fell, laws were enacted and repealed, hopes, rebellions, sciences, heresies, fears, coaches, horticulture, highwaymen, wits, puritans and beaux made history for us. Were the clans gathering for Bonnie Charlie ? Super Flumina Possibly, but angling Henry Needier heeded them not. He is history too, as is James Saunders. Were the plunderers robbing the poor under plea of further Reformation under Edward VI ? It did not affect An- thony Ascham, the Phisician (as he spells it). He was making his Prognostication quite happily. George Morland's anglers are delightful people, with no crackle of the French Revolution in their pretty ears. What large hats the girls have, (a pleasant virtue in women !) and they have a negro to bait and unhook for them. Poor drunken, kindly George ! what a boatful of beauties he gives us, and yet we only think of the Bastille and the massacre of the Swiss Guard for that time. It seems affectation to use a landing net for that six-ounce perch, especially on such a rod ; and the lady in rose is really too brightly coloured for suc- cess in her art. George Morland was no angler, one would say : but he noticed us, and has recorded that we were fishing, when all the world caught fire and travailed and brought forth Napoleon and other wild births. Father Isaac fished through the great Civil War. He is the very embodi- ment of the quiet side of life. How tame 174 Angling Authors he must have looked among the Captains, or Colonels, or Knights-at-Arms, and yet is not his fame a head taller than theirs ? Did not he serve his generation and his race at least as well ? Will he not have as much con- tent, when he reviews his life after the soul's journey of a thousand years? In future editions of the Bibliotheca the entries under manuscripts should be cut out. In the first place they are few and in- effective : and in the second they awaken such a fierce lust of possession that the tenth, or even the eighth, commandment has not a chance of surviving whole. Manuscript the very name has a melody about it, a delicate, insinuating, subtle rav- ishing melody, which haunts one's ears, and makes the plain song of print but a tedious, vulgar tune. But the list here given is too curt. A little audacity, a bold button-holing of almost any official in the British Museum MSS. Department, would have bettered the list. These gentle men (will the compositor kindly keep the words distinct) positively spoil the public. They engender impudence in us. So far from being angry at our en- quiries, or acknowledging that they are tedious, they suggest new nooks for us to Super Flumina search, offer pat facts, and even drop tanged epigrams, which our pens may adopt and claim to have fathered. The Bibliotheca has no excuse, then, for being defective here. If a man who cannot go to a concert may find consolation of a thin kind, by hearing the themes of the chief orchestral pieces played upon the parlour piano, the exile r rom the MSS. Department may like to give his fancy a little head by reading the small gleanings of Messrs. Westwood and Satchell. The first one of aroma is Sloane MS. four folios, 39b. It is now called Baits, and dates from the first half of the XVI century. Anthony Shupton is a name, which dots it rarely : but he is not further to be found. Happy Tony, to have no other history ! The world was slowly taking fire, but he may not even have known of it. Was Luther nailing theses on church doors ? Were divorces afoot ? Was the Pope being sheared into a mere bishop of Rome ? Was the bush fire of the Reformation smoking along the continent ? Tony Shupton has neither eyes nor nose for such matters. He is taking chavenders and compounding four folios, which have "survived so much." Take this again on vellum old vellum is 176 Angling Authors a killing bait for scholars it is called Addit- ional MSS. B.M. No 22496, and its title is Comtes des pecker ies de V Eglise de Troyes. Its dates are 1349 1413. Its contents area minute and detailed account of the yield of the stanks and dykes, of the breams, carps, silverings, luce and eels taken and eaten, of the staking, piling and ditchings done, of the wine and onions eaten by the fisherman. The Black Death is playing havoc. King Edward III and the Black Prince are slaying, plundering, and burning. Free Companies eat up the land. It is the time of Stephen Marcel, and of dreadful Jacqueries. Edward and his sons are in the heart of Champagne, and the fisher munching his onions can climb the banks to see their banners ride by. Then the tide rolls back and the English are beaten off. The terrible Edwards are dead. The French are in the Isle of Wight. Now the English pay a return call in Brit- tany. The armies march by to defeat Philip Van Artevelde. Our Charles VI's lit- tle daughter, Isabelle, marries young Richard of England, and the pescheur drinks their health. Now Henry Bolingbroke keeps a crooked finger in all our pies, and madcap Hal is learning the ways of his subjects in 177 Super Flumina taverns. The mythic Falstaff is maintain- ing Bardolfs nose with fire, but Troyes Church still eats its pike, and chronicles them without reference to politics, wars and plagues. That must be a fine pikey bit, where the Barse and the Seine foregather their waters. How divinely calm it sounds after all the excitements of the history ! and worthy of old vellum too ! The Sloane MS., 1160, a small octavo of 14 folios would tell you how they managed the art in Monmouth's days, and what baits were popular when the capitalist Revolu- tion of 1688 was making a fine to do with its banners of " Freedom and Property," and heralding that dull era, when poverty was discovered to be the worst of all the deadly sins and respectability the noblest of all the virtues. How pleased with them- selves were those pioneers ! Pioneers always are a little complacent. They have not considered the pathos of that word * prevent ' and how to be a pioneer shades off naturally into the kindred meaning of ' to .obstruct.' It seems to us that they might all have been better employed than in bringing in Dutch gin swilling William, especially as silkworm gut had lately been invented. Of course 178 Angling Authors Macaulay made fine cock-a-doodling over their doings in the ears of the equally philistine irreligionists of his day : but poor Macaulay was coated all over with thick carriage varnish. He was never wet with the dews of heaven. How could he know about men ? He would have studied even fishes in their glazed brown museum form. His very name gives one a library headache. It must be tempered by a rush to the river. Anglers are said to be too liberal in their notions of the truth. Perhaps that is so, but let the exacter sort see and miss a medium pike. Let them weigh the creature not with the cool deliberation of the kitchen scales, but with the imagination, if they have any, with a mind still agitated by a quivering rod and a well tugged line. Then we can gibe at their baitings. For the gleam of green and pewter, which looks four feet long at least, and the lug, lug, which seems of about ten foot pounds of energy, will, upon examination by instruments, dwindle and shrink into fractions only. Also it must be remembered that angling for fishes is a very old art. Our fathers have caught their 179 Super Flumina fathers for hundreds of years. That gives a great play for Natural Selection. The bet- ter educated fish survive and breed. The race grows warier. Our catches are less and less, until we invent new ways of luring the cleverer prey. Would William Browne of Britannia's pastorals now catch several pike with his little yellow worm, as he did in the time of James I, splashing them about with a float, too ? Our pikes come from the loins of those who thought meanly of William. But we, too, want a dinner and hope to catch, so we chafe at the erudition of our fish, and vie with it. Some learn or invent newer ways, but others have only hope without determination, and these, un- willing to accept defeat as final, make up for light baskets with heavy leasings. Men are always apt to do this, when the strenu- ousness of the game tells upon them. If we must condemn, let us at least understand them. Moreover, the non-angling public hates to hear of one's blank days. It has no sym- pathy for unsuccess. Its ears are stopped, its tongue loosed, against tales of failure. It trains its angling children in disregard of the boring and ridiculous truth. This is 180 Angling Authors very stupid and wicked of our Aunt Susans and others, and the shame of it is upon their heads in no slight degree. But we are, rather needlessly, guilty too. Blank days have their charm. If the stars fight against us, they are still stars. Take to-day, for instance. The hopeful man rose with the October lark and found the skies grey and the wind in the West, an irregular wind but soft. He packed three rods in the trap a spinning rod, a general purposes one and a light fly greenheart and filled his largest creel with tackle, lunch and a bait can. The small Bass had a corkscrew with it and the amiable housekeeper had even added a glass. The pony was pawing the ground and the word was already given when a note was handed in " Please teach in the school this morning instead of to-mor- row." With a groan he handed back the pony to the groom and went off to the heavy educational harrow. At last the lesson is over and the last child knows its paltry bit. Now the business of the day begins. But horror ! what is this ? Old Emmanuel Adams has fallen sick and would be poulticed with spiritual and literal linseed. Once more the precious hour is lost ; and it is 181 Super F I urn in a now nearly noon and the grey rain is splash- ing the coloured brambles as we drive towards the rich tower of He Abbots, which looms from the yellow trees. Alas ! it is a persistent rain that will soak and destroy all that rain can destroy and that is much. The wretched man, feeling like a hunted Orestes leaves his creel and the rest in the cottage and determines to spin. The wind rises and falls. A grey game of halma seems to be played by mocking spirits upon the water, for little round-headed pawns leap up and die down on the stream. He slides and flounders with squashing feet and cling- ing line, and the spinner behaves as if it were smitten with creeping palsy. Hundreds of yards of rank bank seem like miles. One's cuffs age rapidly and wrinkle. Meadow after meadow is passed and the man frowns and tightens his lips, until at last there is a welcome rush in the water and a fine fish breaks the hooks at the tassel tail of that new one-and-tenpenny bait. The very steel seems soaked soft. In vain another is sent out. Not at home is the return mes- sage. Not at home in hilly ground, not at home by the alders, not at home by the willow at the corner, not at home by 182 Angling Authors the lunch tree, not at home at the one-eyed pool, at the bridge, the bushes, the haw- thorn, the barbed wire, the stump. Ugh, and the rain is racing down the man's spine. He eats sop formerly sandwich and now has lost the corkscrew : but cracks his small bottle and takes beer and water and heart again. A ploughman, wreathed in sacks, offers pity : "Thanks, Tom, try a cigarette." It is all tissue paper and sop, and has a spiritual value only. Back again, still ho- ping, still spinning like Lachesis in gloomy majesty, and the cottage is near again, when the rain stops. Ha ! a palpable bite. It is a Jack, a babe of a span long, and he has to go back, heigh ho ! But something is rising now. Small dace and the pools are astir. The spinner goes to its bran and the man fetches out his hidden riches. Surely a worm here will find a perch, and a grey gnat will fetch the dacelets to the can ! The sun smiles a watery smile and the defeated angler whips joyfully. Not a bite ! Then paste, gentles, wasp grabs, all the things that tease and please. Flies have become to them a mere plague. Blue dun, yellow, black, white, tawny, orange, ring- straked and red, are all scorned. Then the 183 Super Flumina wind rises and the grey rain slowly begins. Coldly, sadly, descends the autumn evening, and the lights begin to wink out. The bell rings for evensong, and there will not even be the parish nurse to represent the two or three who gather together. A hot bath, a rub with a warm towel, and clean raiment end the adventure. How cosy the study looks. The cheerful curl of tobacco-smoke hovers over the lines drying on chair backs, and gives a benison to the steaming jean of the rod cases. One smells neither the oil nor the vaseline. It is good to be alive : and, after all, there are the more fish left be- cause of their coyness to-day. Next week one may have them out in battalions. Non si male nunc et ohm sic erit. Hurrah for Thursday. Non semel dicetnus lo Triumphe Civitas omnis dabimusque divis, if the bishops do not actually prevent it thura benignis. But why was the day blank ? Not the rain, not the season, not the baits, not even the skill were at fault, but the river weeds had just been cut and the fishes were nervous and disturbed. They had been brutally 184 Angling Authors evicted from their freeholds within forty- eight hours of to-day, and the bed of the river is also strewn with insects, who have also been cast out. Frightened and well-fed fishes are nice in their diet. The explana- tion is simple, when one knows it, and cousin Hilda greatly errs if she continues to think that the archer spinner might have called heavy pike from the vasty deep, or that the white moth would have moved the dace. No ! the artificial cockchafer would not have raised a chub under the wall by the lasher ; but all the same, one ought to have tried it. The lame excuse that the withy bed was too wet to enter moves her to ripples of incred- ulous laughter. No one ever really minds being laughed at by Hilda. The only re- venge possible is to plan another expedition in which her wisdom can be commandeered. How about Midney ? We can canoe there in luxury, if only the weather holds, and there is the deep carp hole to try. Midney then let itj be, and if the tackle makers are not false knaves there will be a fine lot of new flies ready for hungry jaws, and a new sort, wagtail as well, which Dr. Greenwood finds to have magical eftect upon the Irish pike. But one must not argue from Irish 185 Super Flumina data. The very pikes of that most unhappy country are mad with pugnacity. Water lords are as easily bagged as landlords over there. Erin may go bragh with pleasure ; but our pikes are not to be caught by her rules. They have neither the size nor the appetites of those nationalist fish. We pre- pare our weapons, and spend hopeful and happy hours testing lines and sharpening hooks with a tiny file, mixing baits and catching the worms by a lantern light in the yard, which is almost as exciting as fishing itself. Suddenly a kind voice in rich West- ern brogue breaks in upon our hopes. " Meister Rowswell, he've a bin a nettin' to Midney, zur ! and he did tell I to car on thic pail of bites." What, Midney netted ! then good-bye to our hopes, for the very sight of a net frightens fish more than all the angles of Christendom. We take the baits with such gratitude as we can acquire, and put them in the water-butt : but our day is spoilt. At last rolling time brings us another chance. It is a winter morning. The mist has settled into white irost. The sun shines in pale gold. The wind is east and we drive to Bradon. The alder tree gives us a pair of small perch only, the lunch tree one dace, 1 86 Angling Authors the one-eyed pool, the bridge, and the old bend, nothing, and it is now one o'clock. Then we try the warm bay by the wire fenc- ing. The mills have begun to work at Ashford, and the brown water comes spotted and tremulous down with a larger sweep. Ha ! here is a better one. I have one too. I've got another. Give me the worms. Look ! Here is a beauty. But what do you think of this ? So we fish, and pant, and ejaculate. We have happed upon a golden hour. They bite everything that we put in. Roach, perch, dace, tench and chub, seem to be holding carnival, or keeping belated Christmas rather, for it is January. No need to whisper, you can laugh and talk. The floats dip and curtsey, and the fish flap boldly out. What fine condition they are in to be sure, so fat and silvery. We pause for a minute and count three-and-thirty, and then notice with regret that the light is going fast and we must beat a retreat. Let me try a spinner as we go back, I plead, just to top the basket with a pike. Hilda laughs. It is full already, and we shall miss the man who is coming on important business, but O, bother, the spinner catches in the bush the very first cast. The line breaks and 187 Super Flumina there is no time to go round and release it, so we scamper off with our twelve-pound- bag, and forget that it is cold and the fog is rising. We only know that we have had a glorious day, and can fill the frying pans of half the village widows with our takings and that is much. 1 88 CHAPTER XI The C^ub and Mel- ancholy. SAVE only carp, the chub engenders more melancholy than any fish that swims. He is always with us. We see him in the sum- mer roll from water-lily to water-lily with most provoking girth and clearness. He leaps in the evening a full foot out of the water. He is heard in the winter smacking his coarse lips in the turbid eddies. He darts from the shallows with a lively swish thirty yards before we get within view of him. He is an omnivorous glutton, who can yet refuse the great cravings of his master maw. He is as self-controlled as an ascetic, though as full of desires as an alderman. He is a very fool and yet a Solomon. All that has been said of his wariness and wis- dom is true ; but it is also true that he may be taken with the stoutest tackle and the roughest gear. He will flee from the shadow of a split-cane rod, but he will fall a victim to coarse string and a barge pole. He will eat anything that any fish will ever eat. He 189 Super Flumina may be caught with pike-spoon bait, spar- row's eggs, bread, gooseberries, blood, worms, cheese, bees, cockroaches, chafers, min- nows, frogs, sardines, raw beef, fat, gentles, alexandras, meal worms, honey, bits of white kid, and indeed, by almost anything. So off you go and try, taking all these things and more, to a really noble haunt of chub. But you return with broken hope, and hardly animation enough to hum a tune, half in- clined to believe that life itself is a savage fraud, with doubts even about angling itself. OUT IN THE SUN. How slowly crawls the road Underneath our eager feet ! As we swing our shoulder load, Breathing deep the crystal sweet. Autumn grass is lush with dew And the hedges droop with pearl : There's a patter from the yew ; Leaves are far too wet to whirl. Is it cold, or eager haste Makes your fingers tremble so, While the taper joints you place ? While the silk slips to and fro ? Oh, for just the tightened line, Just the flap and hearty run ! Something surely must be mine Ere we lose the gallant sun ? 190 The Chub and Melancholy HOME IN THE RAIN. Ah, but Time which walked so slow Now begins to quicken speed : Fiercer fast the minutes go. Is the day gone down indeed ? Empty basket, empty heart, Broken tackle, effort vain, Hope is ended. We depart Through the darkness and the rain. Is there any place to dry ? Dry and rest us when we pass ? Lay the sodden burden by Sadly muddied, too, alas ! There are anglers who have fished the rivers for thirty years and have never taken a chub at all : but there are anglers who have, upon the third or the fourth attempt, made some little inroad upon the paradoxi- cal host. In the hurricane, for example, when men of less daring are at home, you can, with a small spoon, make the further acquaintance of the chub. A line of surgi- cal silk, with a small float forty yards away, will coax him from clear waters, and in ale-coloured locks you may hoist him from under your very feet with a heavy-shotted cable and a sort of meat hook armed with the coarsest lob. Or, again, you may not. 191 Super Plum in a Expect nothing. Fish with a dreary sense of duty. Think that you are taking scienti- fic soundings or making experiments upon the parallelogram of forces. Resolve upon a blank day. Start as a hopeless patient re- solved upon the fresh-air cure for the last stage of phthisis. Make believe that you would rather know than catch. Take a pledge of good resolutions never to be cast down. Consult Dr. Smiles, Hannah More, Akenside, the moral maxims of the Wes- leyan, Baptist, and Sandemanian bodies pas- sim. Wean your soul. Cast out desires like a Buddhist. Think how bald the Universe really is. Remember that you have at- tempted virtue in your time, and with what success. Start with a heavy heart and you can end with nothing worse. He that is down need fear no fall. Chubs sort well with a chastened spirit. It may be there are odd chances some one must be Arch- bishop of Canterbury and basket that 15000 a year, with purple. Some one must get that Field Marshal's baton. These things fall to those who do their duty until they have no relish left for plums. Be clothed with humility and your oldest waistcoat. Flatten yourself : wear a gag. Leave the 192 'The Chub and Melancholy dog at home. Study the lights and winds. Never mind mud. Precaution is a duty, and duty is a necessary servant of success, but a barren thing after all. Duty is a firm buckram suit, but a great deal more than duty is needed for victory than a suit. Read Leopardi. Read Non nobis. Read the Stoics, in the original if you can construe them : but a crib gives a balder tone to their maxims. Hope nothing, believe nothing, and fear everything. That is the chavend- rous frame of mind. There is one healing balsam that you can take without stint, that the chub is very poor eating at any time of the year. That fact has consoled the ad- viser in many a gloomy hour. The grapes look better than they are. Even Sutton's catalogue has finer colours than his gardens, or perhaps it would be fairer to say than his seeds when grown in ours. Fruition is al- ways rather a fraud. He is like the big brother of our school friends who is invinci- ble in fight, and always slogs balls over the boundary, until you get to know him and then you find that his head is not unpunch- able, and he gets out for duck. The younger brother Hope is just as good, in many re- spects better. Do you not remember, my 193 Super Flumina dearest friend, how I bicycled to you with a tearing and throttling weight of large chubs one lovely summer day ? How miraculous they looked, when I piled them in that large dish on the drawing-room floor ! Did we not take pains, too, to dress the best, and serve him up in a surplice-like coil of fine linen, white and clean ? Did we not carve him as if he were a Caesar ? and was he not daintily browned, too ? And the good Burgundy brought out to heighten the relish of him ? And we were prejudiced judges yearning to give him a glorious verdict, and to commit his accusers to dungeons. But yet I can see your kind face now, after the first fork-full. You rose and fetched out some biting sauce, and looked serene as ever, master of your- self, but even I had to confess that the chub must be classed with charity clothing, and "port for the sick poor." Indeed, the char- woman found the rest of them most accept- able, and was grateful next day when I call- ed to see that the chub had worked no muddy revenges upon your dear earthy man. When I labour in vain for chub, I remember that banquet with much consola- tion, and how rarified the cold lamb and salad seemed to us, when we allowed our- 194 'The Chub and Melancholy selves to go on towards it. Still, chubs are beautiful fellows when they leap right out of water at your bumble bee and grab it with zest. There is a fine yellow about them in the evening light which suggests faery gold. There is none of that halting between two opinions in their bite, no thin suction and tremulous quivering such as makes one doubt whether it is heat, or fancy, or the lap of the water, or a carp that affects the line. The chub has a Scot's habit of mind, canny if you like, but not penumbrous. He either bites hard or passes by unmoved. He does not dally with temptation. He sins or is sophron. Was that why St. Francis, upon his sick bed in the bishop's palace at Assisi, had no will to eat except a bit of chub ? Is it not written in the Speculum f Brother Gerard too sent him in three from Rieti. Perhaps the mediaeval chub took life, or gave it up, with more simplicity than ours do, or else Fra Gerard had less of the quality which one would expect in an early Fran- ciscan angler that of guilelessness. In the summer time, a frog tied by the hind leg to a perch hook, upon a none too solid paternoster, and flung out, at sunset, below a pleasant stickle, finds favour in chub Super Flumina land whatever the weather may be. But he must be cast far enough, and if it may be so rather from a punt than from the shore. It is one of the curiosities of angling that a fish is much less concerned at the approach of a boat, even of a steam launch, than he is at the pit-pat of the lightest step upon the bank. It is probably because in the former case there is little sound conveyed through the earth, and earth is to him the unfamiliar and dangerous element. He feels that the water is known to him. Floating logs do not scare him in the least, even if they have keels and branches which dip, and stir the water into eddies and cast queer shadows. Or if the craft hustle the waves about, he puts them down as large, rather slow-moving fool fishes, not stealthy enough to be pisciv- orous, mere asthmatic boobies, who have been fed into dropsical size in the beyonds of his water world. He justs turns out of their path with a cool caution, but hardly turns his head to watch their uncouth pas- sages, and cannot permit himself to forget that his throat-teeth are clean and his supper not yet provided, just because these blunder- ing, high swimming, toothless, and eyeless giants are loafing up or down the stream. 196 The Chub and Melancholy But when the gravel crunches or the mud sucks and smacks, when shadows fall across the sky, as he sees it, from over half the horizon, when things are astir in that horrid and alarming world, whence from early fryhood he has seen beaks, teeth and talons, descend suddenly and aim at his quivering sides, then he becomes much more alarmed than he would be even at the largest stur- geon. An attack from a mysterious quarter is much more startling than from one where the dangers are great but familiar and com- prehended. It is a pleasant thought that in our geological epoch at any rate, we can stroll by the sea without fear of trolls or dragons rushing out of the waters with a liquorish appetite for man meat. Whereas if we lived upon a peninsula, of narrow, though long extent, and from either sea at any time, but especially at meal times, we might expect casual quick snatchings to be made at us, we should regard the unnum- bered laughings of the ocean as loathesome mockeries and distinctly not amusing. So he. The chubby mind is Aristotelian. He is naturally of a social and political bent. He leaves meditation upon personal themes 197 Super Flumina when a brother is in misfortune. He even fasts as a sort of funereal ceremony for his brother absente corpore. Those he never heeded in life, become, when caught and basketed, overpoweringly dear to him. He cannot bear the sight of the places where they played and overate. He steals away and afar upon the loss of a friend and is overpowered with selfish grief. His last flap, the roll of his goggle eye as he neared the shallows compelled by catgut these things move survivors to ensky and ensaint the caught brother. In this there is a trait not uncommonly found in the coarser human chub. He, too, will neglect, even hustle or possibly rob, his brother chub. He will know him all his life, without doing him one single act of mercy, without one tender or attentive passage. He remembers him at school, at church, at the rival ironmongery shop. He has seen him bicycle, watched him dance solemnly at those earnest lower middle-class balls full of seriousness, per- spiration, and ham sandwiches. He knows the man, even to the price of his stockings, but has never felt anything for him beyond a slight impatience at the mere ordinariness of the creature. But let the fellow meet 198 The Chub and Melancholy with some tragic fate, be murdered by a motor car, bludgeoned across Jordan by a policeman, or sunk in a penny steamer ; immediately he becomes " poor dear old so and so. I knew him well. He was a very great friend of mine, such a capital good sort." The tale of affliction widens and deepens in tragic pathos by imputed and post fact affection. It is so often the case that the people we have known, despised, rated, found irksome and exasperating, be- come, when they are well buried, our dar- lings, our deeply regretted and mourned lost ones, fuller and fuller of our affection as time mellows them, of the powers and virtues we never saw in them and which they never really had. It is said that the love of children is often highly developed in the acutest egoists. It is not incompatible with self-adoration, for children do not compete with us. The same is true of the dead. They can add to our self-esteem but cannot detract from it. The greater we account them, the more we figure their devotion to us, the more highly we can depict the value they put upon us, the more excuse we find for self-worship. Hence, we can riotously overleap the actual in what we say and think 199 Super Flumina about them. The chub, unlike the perch, the dace, the pike, and even the gentleman- ly trout goes into a most extravagant mourning for his caught companion, and when he notices his loss will retire in haste to the bed of the stream, go into retreat, forswear all society, give up cockchafer and other delicate meats for at least an hour, or maybe two, and shew every sign of pain and penitence. But such people's grief must be taken with salt. Next day they will be as alert and egoist as though they had never known such loss, and, indeed, if you walk steadily on, you may return to each favoured spot and find the merry game has begun anew and that the mourners have ceased to sulk and have thrown off the gloom, which departs with the audience before whom it was enacted. A piece of cheese rind on the tail of a fly, (a red spinner, marsh brown, or even an Alexandra) will join the mourner to the mourned, given a decent interval. But in a:l cases cast far, and keep your feet as still as you can. There is one great peculiarity about the chub : he is more successful in avoiding nets than almost any fish. He out perches the 200 Chub and Melancholy perch in this, and it is to his great credit. The netsman spreads his toils, and with drags, poles, wading and splashing, works down to the place where these are spread. The foolish tench, roach, dace, and pike, roll and dart before him to their fate, and he gets them by the score ; but look at his catch. There are no chub at all and only a very few perch. Yet the scoundrel has swept over their choicest haunts. Those great goggle faces have been neatly buried in mud, weed, hollow bank, and reed stalks. They have let the legions thunder past. The more the poaching crew have raged and shepherded, the less have those cautious and practical fishes been bullied down the deadly track. Their power of taking cover is almost miraculous. Put two or three small chub in a forcing glass or small aquarium, add a handful of sand and a few pieces of water weed, and when you step quickly up to the place where you keep them you will be astonished to see what they can do, with such insufficient means, to conceal their presence. The very angle at which they project from the floor, the slow washing wave of the tail, the colours, the arrangement of the weed, the gentle 2OI Super Flumina stir of the sediment, all these combine to deceive an eye which has all the odds in its favour. You may even stir your nos- ing chub with a stick, he is as one dead, except that he is as limp and as flexible as a gipsy's tongue or a pastor's conscience. Duri capitones were chub-headed fellows in Latin comedy, who endured much for their bellies' sakes. Our capitones will endure much for fear's sake and the supreme desire to lie low. Indeed, they, like many other living creatures, are strongly of General Baden-Powell's opinion that stillness is the best concealment. It is an education in the art of taking cover to peep through an alder at a school of chub in a clear pool. They do not dart, they simply melt away and your, arts will no more restore them than if you were treating a sponged slate with develop- ing solutions. Merely to try is to wring your heart with that unsportsmanlike love, melancholy, which Burton so well describes. " Many men to fetch over a young woman, widows or whom they love, will not stick to crack, forge and feign anything comes next, bid his boy fetch his cloak, rapier, gloves, jewels, etc., in such a chest, scarlet-golden- tissue breeches, etc., when there is no such 202 The Chub and Melancholy matter ; or make any scruple to give out, as he did in Petronius, that he was master of a ship, kept so many servants, and to personate their part the better, take upon them to be gentlemen of good houses, well descended and allied, hire apparel at brokers, some Scavinger or prick-louse Tailours to attend upon them for the time, swear they have great possessions, bribe, lye, cog and foist how dearly they love, how bravely they will maintain her, like any Lady, Countess, Duchess, or Queen ; they shall have gowns, tiers, jewels, coaches and caroches, choice diet. The heads of Parrats, tongues of Nightingals, The brains of Peacocks, and of Estriches. Their bath shall be the juice of Gillijlowers, Spirit of Roses, and of Violets, The milk of Unicorns, etc." (Anat. in, 2, iii, 4). To courses equally immoral, to such raving melancholy, does the love of the coy chub drive the enamoured and baffled angler. He would think no trick too mean, no im- posture too lawless to try, if only he could recall the banished, vanished objects of his hope. But, alas ! had the time wasted upon the beguiling of women only been put to 203 Super Flumina nobler use in devising new baits and methods for angling, we should not feel so impotently and atrabiliously baffled, as we not infre- quently do. Let romancers write in angling papers and books what they choose : the sad fact remains that there are many and great dis- appointments in this life, even to the skilful and the sanguine. Philosophy can open new doors of hope, but of the keen votaries who press in, how few there are will meet with their heart's desire ! And even those who catch a chub every day have larger hopes than ever fructify. But before you wipe the likely tear away, use your handkerchief rather to catch a bumble bee, with tenderness. Tie two of her feet, with silk, to a perch hook, and put your rod through the bushes and lay it down, leaving the bee to swing an inch, not less, above the level of the stream. Then go back, sit down out of sight and listen. The bee will swing your line to and fro, buzzing, now this way, now that, with pauses. The goggle-eyed chub will watch that bee, until they are convinced by the utter still- ness of the bank that you have gone away in mulish disgust at their vacant room. 204 The Chub and Melancholy Presently they will return, look, wheel, long, circle near, until one, more sure than the rest, pops his great mouth out of the water and seizes your bee, and, if you have skill and luck, hooks himself. The higher you can make him jump the more certain he is to hook himself. Three inches is an easy jump for a chub, and he can manage twice that height without any difficulty, that is, if he will only return. If not, repeat to yourself these appropriate verses. " The Moving Finger writes ; and, having writ, Moves on : nor all your piety, nor all your wit Can lure it back to cancel half a line, Nor all your tears wash out one word of it." OMAR. Then try for some other kind of fish, or for chub in some other place. It is useless to outstay a very scant welcome. Why do chub and roach never do well in the aquarium ? Why should dace outlive these others cceteris paribus ? It can hardly be a question of food, for the chub eats everything edible. It cannot be fright which kills him, for the carp, who is more easily frightened, lives well in captivity, and indeed, in gold-fish form, is native to slavery. 205 Super Flumina Perhaps carp live because they are so very intelligent, ; they soon learn how little the globe-shaking monster masters really injure them. Chub die because they never really understand this simple plan but take the gloomiest views of their own prospects, and thus by melancholy verify their own fore- bodings and die mostly by suggestion. Thus in matters critical the chub belongs to the conservative school. He is of the Miller and Burgon following ; and out of sheer pavid peevishness refuses to adapt himself to servile and narrow surroundings. To look his enemy fearlessly in the face, with goggle eye, and to flourish in despite of him, that is too magnanimous a course for him : he prefers to worry himself to death. Even in ponds he cuts but a poor figure, and is among the first to die of chagrin it must be, unless the anatomists can propound a likelier theory. Like other conservatives, the chub, before he is captured, has an ob- stinate preference for living his own life in his own way, and distrusts the demagogic orators, who offer cheese and other linings for his fair round belly. His melancholy is contagious. 206 CHAPTER XII The Close Season. WHAT the pause is in music, what rain is after many blue days, such is the close sea- son. Mr. Mundella was not only a man of Science, he was an Artist and a Poet, possibly all in his own despite. The ship which is made for sea finds her night of life, her repose and her goal, in the flat quiet of some uneventful dock, where new mornings find her out, and load her with new hopes : whence they send her forth upon new ventures. The Close Season the very sound has a quaker grey about it, a scent of ebb tides, the hush of a large hall when the organ is closed and the people have gone home, and the one old man is putting out the lights. It is lovely and pleasant. Everything ought to have its Close Season : tennis, marriage, golf, home, travel, meat, religion, clarets, controversy, shaving, books, talk, dunning, pomposity, the rules of science, virtue, tobacco, politics, flirtation, hope, oranges, faith, potatoes, 207 Super Flumina the Nonconformist conscience, advertise- ment, etc. All these things, and many more, are the better for a short eclipse, and, indeed, most of them contrive to obtain the grace of a veil, a bank holiday or two, some kindly legislation, an ex- tinguisher, a dock, a holiday, unbuttoned and recuperative moments. If not, a cry arises that they ought to be suppressed altogether. Does not the very earth take a close season for herself in night and winter ? Let Com- merce be like her. Let the Stock Exchange sleep dormant and shares be not transferable say in June. Close the churches, proclaim an interdict after St. John Baptist's Day. Let there be a muzzling time for members say in August. Suspend the newspapers for September at least ; make it criminal to travel in soft goods from some date to some other ; punish top hats with fine or bashing. Let there be a Close time for trousers, when all must wear the toga. Let there be a fence month for barrel organs and Temperance exhortations, for writs, inoculations, motor cars and woodcarving, for soap and pill puffs, and for comments upon the weather. Let there be a more liberal Lent, of wider sweep and greater compass. All mankind 208 'The Close Season would be the gainers. We should be mas- ters of our lives. We could dispense with the seemingly indispensable, and should still further enjoy the enjoyable. There is but one fault in our Mundellan laws. They are too piecemeal. The close season for trout should not end till March anywhere, and the close season for coarse fish should be from March the first to July the first, Semper ubique et ab omnibus. The Scot should forsake his salmon flies and the Devon- ian leave his fingerlings at the same hour. Pike should devour in peace for four voraci- ous months out of the twelve. There is something very arbitrary about the dates of the present close season for coarse fish, viz. March 15th to June 15th. You find the perch for instance, swollen with ripe spawn long before the former date, and the roach are in a sad plight, (like Milton's late es- poused saints), for weeks after the latter date. The anglers would not cry out if the Mundella Acts were again amended, and as for the anti-anglers and the non-anglers they would regard such legislation as an as- sault upon us. They would be grateful to a Government which seemingly pandered to their superstitions, and they might easily 209 Super Flumina upon the strength of this gratitude promised to vote for it, and sometimes, though rarely, even perform their promises at the ballot- box. The Close Season what repose there is in the sound ! One oils one's rods, takes the flies out of tangle, whips over the weak spots, dresses line, looks over the hospital for decayed odds, and by amputation, syn- thesis, fire, silk, sealing wax in spirits, dub- bin, patience, etc., recreates one's little store. In the daytime, if ever there is daylight to spare, one can walk by the same streams where one has worked, if indeed they can he called the same, for what is the same in them ? Neither colour, form, matter, tem- perature, depth, volume, pace nor content, are like what they were even a week ago. The closelier we look, the more like miracle and special creation it all appears. The very minnows have put on scarlet waist- coats ; and the yellow lily-buds in a crystal pool astonish eyes, which last saw a foaming, brown maelstrom at that corner. It seems almost a sacrilege to boat over the best swims : and to find them empty is a severe trial to one's faith. No change of all those which Spring effects is half so marked as the 210 Close Season complete revolution in the grass edges of the stream and in the line of willows. It has an awe-striking effect. It is like entering a room which one left empty and expect to find empty still, and you burst open the door and swing carelessly in ; when sud- denly you find it full of silent waiting people, who fix impenetrable eyes upon you and have some solemn disquieting errand to propound. You thought you were lord of the land : and the whole city is strange to you. You have not even the freedom of it. The moorhens roost in the high willow tree where you lost your last trace. On the very bare bank where you broke your flask, is now a tall hemlock bed and deep bushes of belled pomfrey. The kingfisher is un- easy that you walk upon it up to your armpits in vegetation. He fears you have taken to bird nesting. Everything flows, as we know without Heraclitus, but the flow is more disquieting when it is in flood than when it simply ebbs. We expect change with decay, but change from poverty to wealth, change round-wombed and gorgeously clad, is much stranger and makes one less easy. If God wants to cast us down, He has but to add enough new sensations and the senses perish 211 Super Flumina one by one. He need take nothing away, but only add. The very ear will crack with hearing, and each sense, like Tarpeia, will faint under its wealth. It is some fear of this that gives the huge bounty of spring a menacing tone. But the Close Season. It is in the very intention of things. Civilization means the power to stop to stop fishing or hunting in any of their forms, by turns. The more close seasons the more civilization, the fewer throats cut, the less arson, the finer manners, the daintier life. Your true angler, (a most civilized man, though he does not always look it when he is angling), is a highly nat- tural being, and an enthusiast therefore for close seasons. There are few things which for beauty pass the love of women the quick, tender sympathy and insight which the love of women demands and implies. There are few things which so subdue, and educate, and classify, and quicken all the senses, and the mind, and the soul of a man, as the tender and delicate play of true love. Some even place this exquisite rela- tion above angling itself, as finer, purer, and calling for even more delicate, greater and 212 The Close Season more varied powers. This may be so, and he is happy who can attain to so high an art without being ruined by the penalties, the damnatory clauses which failure im- poses upon the unsuccessful. Let us grant the greatness. Nee periculosius alicubi erratur, nee laboriosius aliquid quceritur, nee fructuosius aliquid invenitur, shall we say? But who, then, attain to any solid bliss in so difficult an art? Surely not the poets. They, from Euripides to Milton, are the worst of mates. Not the philos- ophers of whom Socrates and Sir William Hamilton are types. Though possibly Xan- tippe inspired others, as Lady Hamilton inspired Nelson and Sir Thomas Lawrence. Not the bishops, not the professional men, not any class of the community seem so happy in their love as the working classes. These people, who marry early and have little outward help to happiness, seem, as a rule, to attain the content which the rest describe, sing about, sigh about, talk about, and preach about, but usually miss. There is something noisome and electro-plated about the middle-class song and sentiment of " Home, sweet Home." The gentleman who roves through pleasures and palaces 213 Super Flumina returns to bestow the relics of his attention upon his squalid, stuffy wife and bamboozled family. His notion of home is that of the Englishman's castle, whence he sallies forth to rob and ravage his neighbours. Madame is store-keeper to the loot and lieutenant in the gloomy fortress, a slave to upholstery and fluffy ornament and equally pernicious pseudo-erotic fictions. But the ploughman has no such castle, and no such play-acting to keep up. He takes life quite simply and loves baldly, it seems, but with reality. He is not elevated into an operatic hero. He does not mistake her for Helen, or Pene- lope, or Juliet. He has never heard of any dream of those fair women (whom we do not call homely). But six days in the week, he comes home tired, possibly cross, too ; and is taken as he is, without extenuation. If on Sunday he can find time to tell her that she is still his sweetheart, she is pleased : and thus life passes and love grows on wholesome and rough fare. He learns and practises the true ars amatoria without feigning. But, besides his honesty, he keeps at least six-sevenths of his time for a close season. Contrast him with the average lover, say of the Browning Society, who 214 The Close Season in these matters is probably dining upon decanted champagne. Which is the more civilized lover? These high themes are too heavy and rushing for a light rod and weak wrist to deal with. Let us return to the fence months. Among their other glories is this, that the unemployed angler meditates with satisfaction upon his happy profession. Like most other meditation, and like all creative art, this is but a substitute for life : but it is also a salt and sauce. Does not Hegel say that philosophy, the bird of wisdom, only flies when the daylight is spent? So we invent, correct, repair, account for things, praise our art, and even write, sing, and strive to recommend it, mostly in the close season. Even the Fishing Gazette, if the editor will but be frank, no doubt, collects its best things in this quiet time. Tackle makers send out their catalogues and invite us to walk into their parlours. Pens are mended ; flies tied ; harps are strung. The angling dinner is now more enjoyable. No one need shew fish to prove his stories and when it comes to imagination the clumsiest may outangle the deftest. A few of the weaker brethren get weeded out. They take to 215 Super Flumina other pursuits, some even to golf, and then they talk, in strange unpentecostal tongues, of cleeks, bunkers, baflfy spoons and mashies uncouth terms, which ill fit the mouth of the true disciple. Let them go. They went out from us because they were not of us, or they would not exchange a single cheap hickory rod for a wilderness of baffy spoons. There is no need to regret them. Let them wander in their terra sicca, their wilderness, links as they call it. Let them hug the chain of such links in sandy servitude. Others take to fond things, walking, motor- ing, athletic sports, lion taming, municipal reform, sculpture, or photography. All these things are good, good for purging away the light half-believers, who are worse than downright miscreants. Then the Close Season is a necessity for those excellent Dorian friendships, which bud, set and ripen slowly, by the river-side, these true, unsentimental, honourable friend- ships, between wholesome English men. These are of slow and stubborn growth. They require no artificial feeding. They have no showy petals and contain no fine alembic essences. They arise by such slow imperceptible degrees that you take them as 216 The Close Season part of the original universe. Your friend fishes beside you for weeks ; and your con- versation is short, technical, laconic. You interchange a few angling trifles. You moot a few stray ideas. You suggest a few new methods or make short observations upon the pools. At lunch time you may perhaps talk a little more fully, but on the whole your friendship has no outward and visible or audible expression. You just let it be with- out label or glass-case. It simply weathers. It lies half hidden by little, light, strawy things for months and years, but just at some crisis there it is, the one thing needed to prop up your falling house. The world has nothing more real or solid than these mascu- line friendships. They are severe, un- adorned, often hard. Your friend is some- times brutal in his frank explanation to you that you have made a fool, an ass, or a beast of yourself. But woe be to the man who explains these facts to others in his presence. If your worst deeds have been detected, and exposed ; if you have been caught red handed in flagrante delicto ; if the virtuous world, the more virtuous flesh and the most virtuous devil, are crying fie upon you ; if there is nothing possibly to be said in your 217 Super Flumina defence, that is the very moment when your friend has your photograph enlarged, framed and posted up in his hall. Say that you are struck off the rolls, that your diplomas are cancelled, that your banner is kicked out at the door, that your Society expels you : that is the moment he chooses to let it be known that he stands for the defence, but he does so with such undramatic quiet that presently you will regain your nerve and take some little share again in the great workshop of the world, with the silence of one less wronged than wrong. Or if merely luck is against you and a little clumsiness threatens a large downfall, he stretches out a hand, not always an empty hand either, and saves your balance. You knew him at the river-side, but it was the Close Season which knit him to you God bless him ! and it. At a jocund company of anglers, some time since, it was the custom to bring each man a picture, a merry tale, a poem or a tune, in praise of the genius of the art. Some of these were but small fry and being undersized have been returned to the waters of oblivion. One or two larger takes found a moth-eaten immortality in the magazines, to which the curious may be referred passim. 218 The Close Season One careless author, or too modest perhaps, whose name is not unknown to the initiated, Mr. W. B. Dunn, thought so meanly of his contribution, which was awarded by acclaim the prize of chairmanship, that he tossed it scornfully into the grate. A virtuous person snatched it slily up and treasured it for long in his museum-like creel, whence it was borrowed for the judgment of the public, to the fame or shame of the author. TO THE NAIAD ARUNDINA. I have wooed thee in the sunlight ; I have kissed thee in the wind ; When the air was grey with snowflakes, When the skies were blue and kind, Arundina ! O'er the scented bank of withies, On the hot earth splashed with rain, I have touched thy tender fingers, And have seen thee smile again, Arundina ! Like the sparkle on the water Are those eyes so bright and dear. There's none other of Earth's daughters Has such lips, so red and clear, Arundina ! 219 Super F/umina I have watched thee move like Music, Every line exactly right, Flower of gold among the sedges, Alder shadowed flower of light, Arundina ! Ah ! but very hard of winning ! I may woo thee, but with fear, As a queen is wooed. I tremble As I whisper in thine ear, Arundina ! In thine awfulness and mercy, Teach me how to win anew ; Hold thee tenderly and firmly, Sing the lover's carol through, Arundina ! It was my intention to surprise the author by marrying off his Naiad daughter to a suit- able melody, and thus proclaiming him to be at once a father and a father-in-law, to end the Close Season of his merits : but Mr. Cecil Sharp, who was to have sent me a tune of his own begetting, considers that the gentle streams of Somerset are already so fertile in pastoral ditties that it would be absurd to go afield for melodies when we are so well populated with them already. So I offer instead one which the miller of Summerleas trolled to us, within earshot of his falling waters, one day when the fish were 220 The Close Season less communicative. It is called " Mowing the Barley," and was harmonized by my friend, aforesaid, in his Hampstead Con- servatoire. 'C / rH P r r 1 . J : ;/ ' -f 7 Ofr ? r T * 7 .' 7 J 'r^ ?i ; 1 P ^-L. , n ' T t w i /); ^fl J 7 Xi- ^ 7 r V^F? A lawyer he went out one day A for to take his pleasure : And whom should he spy but some fair pretty girl, So handsome and so clever ? " Where are you going to, my pretty maid ? Where are you going, my Honey ? " " I'm going over the hills, kind sir," she said, " To my father a mowing the barley." 221 Super Flumina The lawyer he went out next day A thinking for to view her, But she gave him the slip and away she went All over the hills to her father. " Where are you going to," etc. The lawyer he had a useful nag, And soon he overtook her. He caught her by the waist so small, And on his horse he placed her. Saying, " Hold up your cheeks, my fair pretty maid, Hold up your cheeks, my honey, That I may give you a fair pretty kiss, And a handful of gold and silver." " O keep your gold and silver too, And take it where you're going, There's many a rogue and scamp like you Has brought poor girls to ruin." " Where are you going to," etc. But now she is the lawyer's wife, And the lawyer loves her dearly. ~ They live in the happy content of life, And well in the place above her. " Where are you going to," etc. Whatever conclusion genteel persons may come to about Mr. W. B. Dunn's verse, his sentiments of affection for fishing are very real ; he is great as a trout compeller and 222 The Close Season salmon-queller. He has done much in for- eign parts and outlying districts of the parish of Stepney, (i.e. the high seas of the world), yet he is as ready as any man alive to catch a tench or even a minnow or an eel or a chub. " Coarse fishing," they call it, but no fishing is coarse unless it is made so by vulgar methods, vulgar measures, and vulgar associations. It is allied to all the other arts and the crafts of man's hand, brain and heart. If it were not for some foolish scorn, poured upon the fisher who takes the thing near to him and rejoices in it, whether that concerns coarse fish, or game fish, or any other kind, many peevish, bilious, invalidish persons would have the power and the means of growing brown, healthy, good- tempered, and even cheerful, by forgetting themselves and their worries over that de- licious pastime. They would regret the right reasonable restrictions of the Close Season, with hearty unrepining regret, and welcome the newly-opened waters with an unaffected enthusiasm. Even the nostalgia of Babylon abates a little, and the too ready tears lose some of their salt, when the noble waters of our exile are explored, plumbed, or watched for the evening rise. We may 223 Super Flumina sit down and weep. There is cause and to spare for all the tears our glands can secrete, but let us watch a poor goose-quill twitch, and we shall wake again in our exile with some measure of gladness and hope to re- build the walls of Jerusalem, which mere tears can never build. FAREWELL TO FISHING. Dear Scaly Muse, of weedy hair And eye confessed basilisky, My love, my wisdom, my despair, My more than whisky ! How oft with fat mephitic worm, Or gentle, highly assafaetid, I've wooed with vain endearing term, Till stiff and wetted. I've flung thee flies, I've proffered spoons Whole heart and gut and constant graces, And lines, for nine revolving moons, In pleasant places. The reeds have whispered sweet respond, What choirs of birds and winds sang carmens Their form of psalm and wavelets fond Lapped out the Amens ! Dear refuge for the half forgot, Balm for the bruised and disappointed, I live, with thee ; to thee am not Half disanointed. 224 The Close Season Dear silent Muse ! no chideress ! Nor too aloof for mortal fingers, Take this my last, my sad caress, While daylight lingers. Three months we part, three months of pain, Three months of unremittent fever. Farewell ! Three months, three months again Sound like for ever. These alders will be thick and green, This sodden bank a lair of grasses, And thou wilt be what thou hast been As each month passes. But I, grey-headed, dearest Muse, Most homely, and most gentle Mistress ! Must leave thee soon, I cannot choose But leave in distress. Maybe old age will touch my arm, Or doctors think me too rheumatic To lose thy silvern girdle's charm For joys ecstatic. Then place my bones by placid He, And lay the green -heart rod beside 'em. I'll see thee on the Coachman smile Or Gnat I've tried 'em. Here in these weeds an hermit lies, Who never pouched the coarse-world's baiting. He laughed at paste, and spoons, and flies, But fished while waiting ! FINIS. 225 Index. Index. 104. Angler, The, at Doomsday, 3 ; Platonic, 3 ; Poets, 34 ; Death as, 36 ; and truth, 179. Angling of the Bible, 18 ; hi Egypt, 60 ; of the Fathers, 20 ; lets to, 184 ; among Latins, 91, et seq. Apostolides, 100. Aristotle, 197. Arnold, Dr., 32. Arnold, M., 57. Artedus, 101. Arrowhead, 163. Arundina, 219. Ascham, 174. Ausonius, 97. Authors lost, 103. BADMINTON sea-fishing, 96. Bag, A, 187. Barley mowing, 221. Berners, Dame, 29, 63. Bibliotheca piscatoria, 170. Blackwell, Mr., 170. Browne's Pastorals, 180. Burgon and Miller, 206. Burton, 202. CAMDEN Society, A crow with, 28. Cannon Street, 151. Carp, 189. Chara, 167. Charles II, 172. Charles V, 51. Chrysostom, St., 73. Chub, 189. City men, Praise of, 153. Civilization, 212. Close season, 207. Clough, 53. Cocculus Indicus, 64. Conferva, 166. Cowley, 2. Cruikshank, 173. Cyclamen, 64. DACE, 130 ; Health to, 140. Davy, 171. Death and Nature, 10. Death as angler, 36. Dennys, 40. Diodorus Siculus, 21. Dray ton, 171. Dunn, W. B., his poem, 219. EDWARD, Sir, 76. Egyptians, 60. Elodea, 165. Ennius, 103. Epictetus, 72. FIGWORT, 160. Fishes, Descent of, 22 ; Habits of, 88 ; named by anglers, 24 ; Names of, 25 ; types of men, 142; Wine with, 142. Fishing, Farewell to, 224. Fletcher, P., 171. Folkerzheimer, 27. Francis, St., 52, 195. Friendship Dorian, 216. Fuller, 129. GALEN, 64. Gerarde, 160. 229 Index Girton. Ideals of, 122. Gold. Field of, 31. Graham, Mr. C., 14. Groundbait, 90. HEGEL. 215. Heine, 121. Hilda. 8. 58, 122. 155. Hoffman and Jordan, 100. Homer, 61. Horace, 68, 93, 189. Howitt, W., 171. Huish, 173. Huldibras. 38. ITALIAN relation, 28. BWBLL for Gentrie, 173. ewel, Bishop. 27. ones and Draper, 106 u venal, 99. KARTEROS. his views and boots, 55- 97- LABOORER, Praise of, 214. Lampson, Mr., 54. Latin rule, 91. Lanson, W., 136. Leigh Hunt, 171. Lucretius, 57, 94. Luke, Dr., his research, 38. Lyra Elegantissima, 55. MACAULAY, 179. MSS., Various. 176. Man, Types of, 142. Martial, 68. Marsh, Dr., 169. Mascal, L., 33. 172. Midney, 185. Mitford, Miss, 171. Montaigne, 67. Moon and shares, 156. Morant, Mr., his poem, 87. Morland, 173. Mountain climbing derided, 83. Mundella, his Acts and Deeds, 207. Myrc. 159. NBBDLBR, 173. Nobbes. 173. Normans, 23. North, 173. OILS, 90. Omar Khayyam, 27, 45, 205. Oppian, 1 06. Optimist, Song of, 16. Otter. 2. Outfit, Chap. V, 72. Out in the sun, 190. Ovid, 93. PARKINSON, 66, 162. Patience, 87. Perch, 33, 148. Philadelphian Academy, 100. Philpot, V. B., his poem, 48. Pike. in. Pindar, Peter, 54. Piscium Synonymia, 101. Plantain water, 164. Plato. 61, 67, 99. Pliny I. 67. 164. 166. Pliny II. 93 Plutarch. 93. Plymouth Marine Inst., 107. Poet Anglers, 34. Pope, A., 59, 149. QUARTERLY. The, 31. RAYMOND, O., 173. Roach, 38. Rochester. Lord, 172. Romans, 91. Rose, Thames, 164. SACNDBRS, 174. Satchell and West wood, 170. Scarus. 68. Schneider. 102. Season, Close, 207. Shakespeare. 70, 90. Sharp, Mr. Cecil, 220. 230 Index Shelley, 125. Signatories, Doctrine of, 161. Smiles, Dr., 192. Songs : Angler Death, 36 ; Arundina, 241 ; Farewell to Fishing, 224 ; Health, A, 140 ; Home in the Rain, 190 ; Mowing the Barley, 221 ; Optimist, 16 ; Out in the Sun, 190 ; Spinning, 115. Spinners, 115. Spring, 2. Stowe House, 150. Superstitions, 158. Susan, Aunt, 5, 14, 114. Synonymia, Piscium, 101. TAVERNER, 172. Thompson, Professor, 104. Tigers, 118. Truth, Anglers and, 170. Types, 142. VALLISNERIA, 167. Vaughan, H., 85. Victoria, Queen, 48. Virgil, 94. WALTON and Cotton, 30. Water, 84. Water Lily, 162. Wellington, 121. Westwood, 170. Wine, 142. Wolcot, 54. Wordsworth censured, 85. Worm, Humanitarian cruelty to, 137. Wotton, Sir H., 33. 231 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. Form L9-40m-7,'56(C7904)444 L11WAKY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS AJVGELES SK Mar son U39 Super flumina M3lis