SOME WILTSHIRE MEMORIES 



III 

 SOME WILTSHIRE MEMORIES 



IF you touch on Wiltshire fishing nowadays you 

 are expected to be serious ! Nature has linked 

 the county with Hampshire, and Hampshire 

 fishing in literature is a portentously solemn affair. 

 To crack jokes or look about you is accounted, I take 

 it, as mere fooHshness, and to expect an entertaining 

 aboriginal upon the bank would, I fancy, be futile. 

 Unlike those of the north and west the rustics of the 

 chalk counties know little or nothing of trout-fishing, 

 and care less, though they hang betimes on the bridges 

 and watch the big fish, so conspicuous in these clear 

 chalk streams, with the same detached interest they 

 might exhibit towards pheasants feeding on a stubble. 

 And the great trout ignore them with a complacent 

 contempt which would astonish the timid quarter- 

 pounder of a Welsh brook, who dashes for his Hfe on 

 any attempt at such familiarity. If you didn't know 

 better you might almost assume that they were easy 

 to catch, just as the Cockney scribe, moved to satiric 

 diatribes at the sight of hand-reared pheasants and 

 oblivious to the rest of the programme, thinks it must 

 be child's play to shoot them. 



Wiltshire, from this point of view, means the upper 



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