THE COMPLETE ANGLER 149 



for a pike, you are to chuse the yellowist that you can get, 

 for that the pike ever likes best. And thus use your frog, 

 that he may continue long alive : 



Put your hook into his mouth, which you may easily 

 do from the middle of April till August ; and then the 

 frog's mouth grows up, and he continues so for at least 

 six months without eating, but is sustained none but He 

 whose name is Wonderful knows how : I say, put your 

 hook, I mean the arming-wire, through his mouth, and 

 out at his gills ; and then with a fine needle and silk sew 

 the upper part of his leg, with only one stitch, to the 

 arming-wire of your hook ; or tie the frog's leg, above 

 the upper joint, to the arming-wire ; and, in so doing, use 

 him as though you loved him,* that is, harm him as little 

 as you may possibly, that he may live the longer. 



And now, having given you this direction for the baiting 

 your ledger-hook with a live fish or frog, my next must 

 be to tell you how your hook thus baited must or may be 

 used, and it is thus : Having fastened your hook to a line, 

 which, if it be not fourteen yards long, should not be less 

 than twelve, you are to fasten that line to any bough 

 near to a hole where a pike is, or is likely to lie, or to have 

 a haunt, and then wind your line on any forked stick, 

 all your line, except half a yard of it, or rather more, 

 and split that forked stick with such a nick or notch at 

 one end of it as may keep the line from any more of it 

 ravelling from about the stick than so much of it as you 

 intend ; and choose your forked stick to be of that bigness 

 as may keep the fish or frog from pulling the forked stick 

 under the water till the pike bites ; and then the pike 

 having pulled the line forth of the cleft or nick of that 



* It is this expression, with the instructions given in the paragraph, 

 on which is mainly founded the charge of cruelty against Walton, and 

 no doubt gave rise to the lines of Byron so frequently quoted : 



" That quaint, old, cruel coxcomb, in his gullet 

 Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it." 



Don Juan, canto xiii. 



