"FYSSHE AND FYSSHEYNGE." 



123 



On the same river is a club of American gentlemen, who pay $1,000 a year 

 each for their fishing privilege. 



Most of the Canadian salmon rivers are leased at $200 and upward, the lessees 

 all having expensive quarters and outfits. 



"Fysshe and Fyssheynge'' have their quaint and humorous features. I doubt 

 if any avocation or pastime has more of them. One of the most grotesque conceits 

 in angling literature is the poem entitled "The Skeleton Angler." It will do very 

 well for "last words" to this paper. The author of the verses was a London tackle 

 dealer, and the effusion appeared originally as an advertisement of his goods. It 

 is really a remarkable piece of fanciful imagination. I have copied it from Manley's 

 clever book. It runs thus : 



"When the clock in yon gray tower 

 Proclaims the deep, still, midnight hour, 

 And ominous birds are on the wing, 

 I rise from the realms of the Bony King. 



"My bonny elm coffin I shoulder, and take 

 To fish in the blood red phantom lake, 

 Where many a brace of spectral trout 

 Forever frisk, dart and frolic about. 



'Then the hyena's ravening voice 

 Gladdens and makes my heart rejoice! 

 "The glow worm and the deaths-head moth 

 Are killing baits on the crimson froth. 



"For work bench I've the sculptpred tomb, 

 Where tackled form by the silent moon; 

 Of churchyard yew my rods I make; 

 Worms from the putrid corpse I take; 



Lines I plait from the golden hair 

 Plucked from the head of a damsel fair; 

 Floats of the mournful cypress tree 

 I carve, while night winds whistle free. 



"My plummets are moulded of coffin lead; 

 For paste I seize the parish bread. 

 The screech-owl's or the raven's wing 

 For making flies are just the thing! 



"Should thunder roll from the barren shore, 

 I bob for eels in the crimson gore, 

 A human skull is my live-bait can. 

 My ground-bait the crumbling bone of man, 

 My lusty old coffin for punt I'll take, 

 To angle by night in the phantom lake. 



"While Dante's winged demons are hovering o'er 

 The skeleton trout of the crimson gore, 

 To the blood-red phantom lake I go, 

 While vampyre bats flit to and fro." 



Afterward follows an epigram : Scene, sunrise. All the phantoms and obscene 

 creatures out of sight in their little beds, and the author of the verses cheerfully 

 at work in his shop at Hungerford market, where all good fishermen are respect- 

 fully invited to call. 



The pathos is really too shocking to inflict upon an imagination wrought up to 

 the supreme pitch, and therefore I spare my readers the collapse which a perusal 

 of the lines would be sure to entail. 



