44 ANGLING IN GREAT BRITAIN. 



chub, perch, and (sad to add) with pike. Throughout the 

 summer angling is made the occasion of happy water 

 picnics. Hot bright days will mostly find all but the surface- 

 feeding fish ensconced within the cool shady arbours of 

 their subaqueous abodes, and morning and evening are the 

 anglers' likeliest times for sport. The^ carp, however, — 

 rarest of objects in the fisherman's basket — loves the blazing 

 summer weather, and on intervening cloudy days may be 

 hooked unawares. The long days are welcome to the angler 

 on account of the spells of calm evening fishing afforded ; 

 and a traveller rushing through the kingdom by any of the 

 main lines of railway will be able to observe how univer- 

 sally popular is the amusement. By river, lake, canal, 

 pond, clay-pit, and ditch, coming within ken of his carriage 

 window, he will behold its persevering followers. 



In the pond out of which the horses come to slake their 

 thirst after the day's team-work is over, the schoolboy, 

 having got through, at scampering pace, to-morrow's lessons, 

 is allowed to make his first essays in angling ; and perhaps 

 to the majority of us those juvenile snatches of fishing, with 

 tackle of the most primitive kind, live longest in the memory, 

 not only because of the singular passion for the sport 

 which takes root in the boyish mind never to be eradi- 

 cated, but because of the wonderful luck which proverbially 

 falls to the neophyte's share. How often does it happen 

 that the expert fisherman, with his delicate silk line and 

 drawn gut links, with his carefully chosen baits, and working 

 with all the wisdom of mature experience, has the mortifica- 

 tion of seeing some untutored rustic walking away with a 

 string of fish, while his basket remains untenanted ! And 

 in some of those out-of-the-way ponds in rural England — 

 ponds that have held fish from time immemorial — there is 

 rare sport to be obtained on summer evenings with the 



