208 THE COMPLETE ANGLER 



Next, let me tell you, you shall fish for this roach 

 in winter with paste or gentles ; in April with worms 

 or cadis ; in the very hot months with little white snails, 

 or with flies under water, for he seldom takes them 

 at the top, though the dace will. In many of the hot 

 months, roaches may also be caught thus : take a May- 

 fly, or ant-fly, sink him with a little lead to the bottom, 

 near to the piles or posts of a bridge, or near to any 

 posts of a weir, I mean any deep place where roaches 

 lie quietly, and then pull your fly up very leisurely, 

 and usually a roach will follow your bait to the very 



ROACH 



top of the water, and gaze on it there, and run at it and 

 take it, lest the fly should fly away from him. 



I have seen this done at Windsor and Henley Bridge, 

 and great store of roach taken, and sometimes a dace 

 or chub ; and in August you may fish for them with a paste 

 made only of the crumbs of bread, which should be of 

 pure fine manchet ; and that paste must be so tempered 

 betwixt your hands, till it be both soft and tough too ; 

 a very little water, and time and labour, and clean hands, 



thereof, and to these they tied wheels, creating thereby a current, 

 which drove the fish into those traps. This practice, though it may 

 sound oddly to say so, is against Magna Charta, and is expressly 

 prohibited by the twenty-third chapter of that statute : In the year 

 1757, the Lord Mayor Dickenson sent the water-bailiff up the Thames 

 in a barge well manned and furnished with proper implements, 

 who destroyed all those inclosures on this side of Staines, by pulling 

 up the stakes and setting them adrift." H. 



