CHAPTER XVII. 



EELS AND ELVERS. 



" The cockney put the eels i' the pasty alive." SHAKESPEARE. 



IN many of the little streams which are tributary to our 

 mud-bordered rivers, there may be seen in the spring and 

 summer months (but especially when the tender green of 

 the fresh young leaves gladdens the eye, and the blue-bells 

 and the cowslips tell us that Nature is awakening out of 

 her winter sleep, when the swallows are wheeling and the 

 swifts shrilling in the air, when the bats are flitting in the 

 gloaming and the night jar churrs from the pine-tree 

 bough), great numbers of wriggling worm-like eels. All 

 are pursuing a steady course up-stream. Nothing seems 

 to stop them. A short time ago, by the side of a mill- 

 sluice on the Trym, a tributary of the Bristol Avon, I saw 

 some thousands of these little eels elvers they are called 

 by the country folk wriggling and squirming up a dark- 

 green vertical wall, not less than four feet high, over which 

 the water by the side of the sluice was gently trickling. 

 The dark green of the lowly vegetation on the vertical 

 surface of the wall was almost hidden by the grey-brown 

 mass of diminutive fishes, in the midst of which would 

 flash out here and there the lighter grey of the under- 

 surface of some unusually energetic elver. With one 



