ANGLING FOR PIKE. H7 



is no doubt of sport, with great pleasure, betwixt the 

 goose and the pike ; it is the greatest sport and plea- 

 sure that a noble gentleman in Shropshire doth give 

 his friends entertainment with." 



M'Diarmid in his amusing work entitled the " SCRAP- 

 BOOK," gives a similar account of this curious mode of 

 fishing. " Several years ago," he says, " a farmer in 

 the immediate neighbourhood of Lochmaben, Dum- 

 friesshire, kept a gander, who not only had a great 

 trick of wandering himself, but also delighted in pilot- 

 ing forth his cackling harem to weary themselves in 

 circumnavigating their native lake, or in straying 

 amid forbidden fields on the opposite shore. Wish 

 ing to check this vagrant habit, he one day seized the 

 gander just as he was about to spring into the pure 

 breast of his favourite elemejit, and tying a large fish- 

 hook to his leg, to which was attached a part of a dead 

 frog, he suffered him to proceed upon his voyage of 

 discovery. As had been anticipated, this bak soon 

 caught the eye of a greedy pike,- which, swallowing 

 the deadly hook, not only arrested the progress of the 

 astonished gander, but forced him to perform half-a- 

 dozen somersets on the face of the water ! For some 

 time the struggle was most amusing, the fish pulling, 

 and the bird screaming with all its might, the one at 

 tempting to fly, and the other attempting to swim, 

 from the invisible enemy: the gander the one mo- 

 ment losing, and the next regaining his centre of 

 gravity, and casting between whiles many a rueful 

 look at his snow-white fleet of geese and goslings, who 

 cackled out their sympathy for their afflicted commo 

 dore. At length victory declared in favour of the 



