ANGLING FOR PIKE* 117 



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 element, 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 bait 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 of 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 



