82 DAYS STOLEN FOR SPORT 



were it adopted. He kept the members and, I must 

 confess, the President, in an uproar of laughter, and 

 then wound up with what he was pleased to term the 

 pathetic side of this proposal. 



'You go out with your brother members to fish 

 in the pike competition, and what WcLS your excuse 

 at home? Why, of course you can hear yourself 

 a-sajing it, "The first prize is a china tea-service, 

 and I stand a chance, dear." What then? Why 

 you gets a jack; leastways, it would have been a 

 jack had you not entertained this resolution, and 

 now what is it? W^hy, a pike, three pounds two ounces, 

 three pounds jack and two ounces pike; and it's on 

 those two ounces that the china tea-service hangs. 

 Can't you see yourself nursing those two ounces in 

 damp handkerchiefs, one of them borrowed from your 

 chum, that they may remain with you until weighing- 

 in time? They won't, unless a miracle happens. I 



have heard it said that it's a d d bad pike that 



won't increase in weight after capture, and to hear 

 some men talk they continue growing for years after. 

 My particular chum, Banfield, there, for instance; 

 he isn't a big man, but he is the biggest authority, 

 for his size, that I know of on the growth of captured 

 fish; what he has caught have grown by leaps and 

 bounds; but that might not happen to the one on 

 which the tea-service hangs; so don't wait for miracles, 

 keep it in constantly moistened handkerchiefs with 

 its mouth wide open and hope that something will 

 drop into it.' 



Men, middle-aged men, and old men, too, grow 

 very boyish by a week's feasting on the sweet imagin- 

 ings of what may happen on the day for which they 

 have a permit to fish a water where the fish seldom 

 see a rod, and, indeed, where education in matters 

 piscatorial has been so much neglected that the most 

 ancient of them are as innocent as newly-hatched 

 gudgeon. I can see the backward growth towards 



