THE FRESH-WATER AQUARIUM. 37 
well known to all who were ever seduced into playing 
truant, to try their boyish luck with a blood-worm and a 
bent pin, or who have since sunned themselves in the 
holiday pages of Izaak Walton, to fall in love with milk- 
maids, and dream all night of reedy rivers that sig and 
sparkle, and fishes fried in meadow cowslips. ‘These are 
delicate fish, whether for the table or the tank. As the 
latter concerns me most here, let me warn the reader to 
proceed cautiously, for these lovely creatures have a sad 
habit of perishing quickly in confinement. In winter 
time they may be kept with ease, but as spring ap- 
proaches, the best care for them will only be rewarded by 
the spectacle every morning of one or two floating on the 
surface, never to swim again ; while they do live, there are 
no more interesting creatures to be found for the gratifi- 
cation of the domestic circle. Bleak are even more 
sportive than minnows, and will chase a fly or small 
| spider thrown in to them, till they tear it into shreds, and 
then will fight like Irish lads for the pieces. An aquarium, 
stocked with bleak and minnows, is a perpetual Donny- 
brook Fair, and will provoke the laughter of the dullest 
melancholic that ever looked at water as a medium wherein 
to end his imaginary woes. They soon feed from the 
hand, and eat bread greedily, darting after the crumbs 
with even more eagerness and vivacity than a party of 
school boys scrambling for halfpence. Their dazzling 
silvery scales, marked with the bright lateral line of 
spectral green, their taper forms, and large bright eyes, 
enlist all our sympathies, and compel us to doat upon 
them. If they are the best of fishes in this respect, they 
realise Wordsworth’s famous passage— 
