70 ANGLING IN GREAT BRITAIN. 



selves, I should recommend anglers to hold their tongues 

 upon the subject. It is very plausible to argue, as many- 

 do, that it is vouchsafed to fishes to enjoy a minimum of 

 pain ; and there are some who are so convinced of this 

 great gift to the finny race, that they have at last apparently 

 persuaded themselves that fish rather like the sensation of 

 being hooked and played than otherwise. It may be so. 

 With regard to the pike I do not, however, hesitate to 

 declare that I have no bowels of mercy for him. Last 

 year I read a singularly interesting book by a lady, who 

 described her travels by fell and fiord in Iceland. The 

 authoress was a confessed fly-fisherwoman, and she, as 

 might be expected from one of the tender-hearted sex, 

 seemed to be a little troubled in mind upon the question of 

 cruelty. One argument of hers struck me as being so 

 apposite, that I entered it in my note-book, and, in 

 beginning this chapter, which is virtually one upon pike 

 fishing, I will take the liberty to quote it : — 



" Fish are outside our circle altogether, and we may have the 

 further satisfaction of thinking that though they seem to live 

 particularly careless, jolly lives, they all end in being eaten, either 

 by us or by each other, unless they meet with great ill-luck, such 

 as chemical waste in rivers, and are poisoned. Now, for every 

 big fish we kill, and it is these we aim at, a number of merry little 

 fishes have longer lives ; so we anglers are really benevolent 

 institutions from a purely fishy point of view. Real fish, too, as 

 distinguished from whales and seals, have no attachment to each 

 other — they are only rivals. Witness the fighting for bait in a 

 shoal ; witness the withered old carp wrestling with each other in 

 ancient palace waters. Therefore, in catching a fish you make 

 no home desolate, you bereave no fond creature of a friend. 

 Cool, calm, and selfish, the fish goes on his glittering way like a 

 regular man of the world ; he misses nobody out of his water 

 home, and, when he ends an easy life by an easy death, nobody 

 niisses him." 



