288 
bolts it whole, leaving it to fight the 
matter out with hisinterior, unaided by 
artificial stimulants. What a text for 
the total abstainer! I will not enlarge 
tipon at, asd ‘donot belong’ to the 
species. To be a really effective apostle 
of the creed, you should at one time 
have swung the whole beat of the pen- 
dulum. A moderate drinker, hated on 
the one hand and despised on the other, 
is a hopeless person to convert. 
The perch fishing, too, is excellent of 
its kind. They are a bony tribe, and 
usually despised as an article of food; 
but some of the larger ones, which run 
up to3 tb in weight, killed at the proper 
time of year, are excellent in a water- 
suchet, delicately prepared in suitable 
stock, with shreds of horse-radish 
to heighten the flavor. Like most 
perch fishers, I am absolutely per- 
suaded that if you lose one which you 
have hooked, he goes and tells all the 
others in that hole. He was probably 
the one on guard, posted to look out 
for danger, as I have seen witha herd of 
deer, or with the wild cattle at Chilling- 
ham, and he nobly took the bait to see 
where the peril lay, glad enough, no 
doubt, when you foolishly lowered the 
point of your rod, to get off, finding 
life with his friends more sweet than 
death for his country. When this has 
happened, you had better remove your- 
self to other grounds at once, for never 
another bite will you get until you do. 
On the other hand, with prudence, you 
may clear out a hole of every fish it 
contains. My favorite perch-ground 
was a place called Tommy’s Hole, and 
I have caught from eighteen to twenty 
large ones in that single place. Who 
Tommy was, and whether he ended his 
life there by design or accident, I never 
could find out. 
But—and it is a dreadful thought!— 
The American Angler 
the perch were finer in that hole than 
anywhere else. 
The fish are, I have always thought, 
rather above the average in intellect, 
like trout, and unlike salmon and pike, 
which are undoubtedly of low mental 
calibre, and are unable to control an 
unnatural appetite for what one would 
think must be most unlikely looking 
dainties. ,A salmon, when he is so 
minded, will take almost anything you 
choose to place, in a sufficiently allur- 
ing fashion, under hisnose. The man- 
ner of your presenting it to him, the 
lightness of your cast, has more to do 
with his acceptance of your attentions 
than the substance of your offering. 
Like a woman, when he won’t, he won’t, 
nothing will make him. Leave him to 
his reflections and go home. You will 
be more profitably employed in testing 
your tackle against the time you meet 
him in a happier mood. 
Pike are very easy to catch, and skill 
has little to do with their capture 
Standing one day on the bridge I cast 
my bait into the river to see if the line 
ran easily through the rings. The top 
of my trolling-rod was not secured and 
fell into the water with a splash. At 
that moment a pike took the bait in 
spite of my clumsy cast, and I landed 
him with the last joint of my rod swim- 
ming in the stream. In spite of my 
appreciation of the perch-mind, I must 
admit that one day I made the acquaint- 
ance of a very foolish one. I was sit- 
ting idly in the boat on a bright sum- 
mer afternoon (June is the time to 
catch perch, as they are then in the 
holes; when they are in the shallows 
they will not take the bait), and, hav- 
ing detached the piece of shotted gut 
and hook with its minnow from the 
line, put my arm into the water as deep 
as I could and watched my tinny bait 
