CHAPTER XVII 



TENCH 



I'HIS succulent and lusty fish is the primest table fish of 

 the Broadland; and I shall die happy when I think of the 

 numbers of lusty tench I have eaten, cooked in milk or fried 

 in butter. The old monks were not " all-fool," as they say 

 in Norfolk. 



The tench's " coming up " (from the mud) is one of the 

 portents of spring ; for though the water may warm in earlv 

 spring, yet the tench will not come up unless spring have 

 really set in — and they seem to know. So that the amphibians 

 pass the word round joyfully, "The tench be up." And 

 should you be fortunate to get one of the first risers from 

 his wintry sleep — a black-looking fellow he will be, too — 

 you must open his stomach, and you will invariabl}' find 

 little shells therein. Sometimes they come up marked with 

 yellow, so that some old marshmen say they "have been lay'rig 

 in the reeds, and growed a bit, so that mark come." Reed- 

 cutters have dug them out whilst dydling, and found them two 

 feet deep in the mud, head downwards. Some — for they do 

 not mud in shoals — aver those found head downwards were 

 flying from a pike. Those dug from a depth immediately 

 opened their raiouths and kept them gaping for ten minutes 

 when thus unceremoniously dragged from their winter beds. 



In the spring the smaller fish rise first ; they are probabty 

 mudded nearer the surface, and feel the genial heat first. 

 They eat best soon after they are up, and get " washed out," 

 and fattened upon "weeds off the bottom," worms, and small 

 mollusca — some of the finest weighing four pounds, some 

 measuring twenty-two inches in length. 



