Roaehing. Ill 



Then a faint bite or two, and an interregnum ; the shoal has, as it often 

 does, taken a little cruise up or down or under the banks. So we pitch 

 in two or three balls of bait, and wait to give them time to recoveri 

 "It's right, old man." "Right it is," I reply; " we are in for a biggish 

 day — two and a half or three dozen, I expect. They'll be on again in a 

 quarter of an hour or so, Bibimus." " Bibimus ;" and we do. We look 

 over the lines and hooks to see all sound. A big fish or two primes a 

 few yards down. "The shoal has dropped, you see;" and I pitch in a 

 little loose bait, and then we load up pipes ; take note of our marks on 

 ""the opposite bank to see if the water is rising or falling, as it is apt to 

 sometimes, four or five inches or more in the day ; and then we begin again, 

 and in five minutes are landing fish as fast as ever — nothing under half 

 a pound, and very few at that. 



"Hullo!" said Jork, as we landed a handsome roach. "You've got 

 some precious great pike here ; only look at this fish," holding up one that 

 had been sorely wounded. 



" We have pike here, and a great nuisance they are at times, driving all 

 the fish out of the swim at a moment's notice in the very middle of your 

 sport ; but that was not a pike that did that." . 



"No! What then?" 



" Why, a heron. There are one or two of the beasts that haunt this 

 river, and I have seen many of the larger roach wounded like that. At 

 one time I thought, like you, that it was the work of pike, but one morning 

 I found a good roach, of full a pound weight, lying on the bank with a 

 hole right through him where the heron had spiked him ; he had not been 

 dead ten minutes, and was not even stiff. I saw the scoundrel standing on 

 the bank in the early morning once or twice after that, and tried to get a 

 shot at him, but he was too wary. My son cut the dirt up right under his 

 nose with a rifle bullet one morning, and that startled him a bit, for since 

 then he has gone further afield. Until this I had no idea that herons 

 would tackle so large a fish, and that being so, the mischief which a pair or 

 two of those birds must do to any river is considerable. Down on our 

 river at Andover there is always a pair of these brutes ; we constantly see 

 them in the meadows, Now suppose they take a couple of trout each per 



