FISHING IN RIVER, STREAM, AND LOCH 157 



throbbings of mad excitement, in place of wasting 

 away in slow inanition when his strength has failed 

 and his jaws are fangless. We have far more 

 sympathy for the harmless hare, tossed over in the 

 teeth of the remorseless greyhounds. But there too, 

 after all, the end came quick ; and up to the 

 moment when she was seen squatting in her form, 

 her hours had been gliding by in blissful uncon- 

 sciousness of the tragedy in which she was so soon 

 to play the leading part. While, on the other hand, 

 the rattling gallops after the hounds, the long days 

 on the breezy down among the coursers, have spared 

 more pain to many gentlemen of the field than 

 any amount of physic or mineral waters. Who can 

 say how many latent diseases have been indefinitely 

 stayed off, if not eradicated ? We know that that 

 gallant veteran, who groaned heavily in spirit in the 

 early morning as he painfully raised his rheumatic limb 

 towards the stirrup, swung himself from the saddle in 

 the afternoon a different creature, after the " sharp 

 sweating in his clothes." While as for fishing, to come 

 back to our moutons, the " cruelty " in fishing scarcely 

 deserves consideration. We do not go so far as to say, 

 with some enthusiasts, that a fish is the livelier for the 

 hook he carries away, and that it tickles his palate at 

 meal-times like pickles or Worcester sauce. But we 

 are persuaded that the inconvenience it causes him must 

 be infinitesimal, since the smart no more interferes with 

 his appetite than the burn of a chili on the palate of an 

 epicure. Every angler must remember cases in his 



