52 ANGLING. 



gaze at it for a^moment, hold it in doubt as if startled ; and, when 

 he fancies all is safe, he will gobble down the worm, shake his 

 head when he finds something appending to it, and then plunge off 

 with all speed. 



The bush-angler should carefully contrive to keep the end of his 

 rod exactly parallel with the edge of the water, for if he allow it 

 to hang over the bank or bushes, the fish will see it, take fright, 

 and fly off without ceremony. In drawing the line out of the 

 water, care should be taken to avoid lifting it uj) perpendicularly, 

 it should rather be drawn out in a slanting direction, and then the 

 water will not be so much disturbed. 



When ^ the weather and water are best adapted for shade or 

 bush-fishing, the trout are often very hungry; and if you can only 

 contrive to keep yourself and tackle well out of sight, you may 

 safely calculate on good success. In order to show to what 

 extremities ^this fish is sometimes reduced, wej shall relate an 

 incident which fell under our own observation in 1826. This was 

 a remarkably hot and dry summer ; many rivers in England were 

 nearly dried up ; and the fish in some of the shallower streams 

 were entirely destroyed for want of water. We had gone out 

 one fiercely not day, to the distance of ten miles, in the North of 

 England, to a favourite spot for bush-fishing. When we arrived 

 at the water, we found, to pur dismay, that we had left our worm- 

 bag behind us. Our mortification was extreme. To get a worm 

 of any kind was next to impossible, for there had not been a drop 

 of ram for three entire months, and the fields were burnt up like 

 the deserts of Africa. We happened, by mere chance, to have an 

 old bait-bag in our pocket, in which there were about twenty old 

 dried up, shrivelled worms, so dry, indeed, that they almost 

 -crumbled into powder between the finger and the thumb. We 

 steeped them in water as a desperate resource, and contrived 

 to thread them on a very small hook. The expedient proved suc- 

 cessful -and we returned home with a very fine basket of trout. 



The French anglers catch hundreds of trout in the months of 

 May and June with the natural May-fly. They put it alive on a 

 small hook, and let it float down the stream, and are generally 

 very successful. They throw or spin their fly into particular spots 

 of the river, especially where they see that a fish is rising, with 

 considerable dexterity ; but this mode of angling terminates when 

 the May-fly is gone. Many ^of the English residents _in France 

 follow this practice. There is a plan analogous to this adopted 

 by persons in this country. They make a pair of wings of the 

 feather of a landrail, and on the bend of the hook put one or two 

 caddis; the head of the caddis should be kept as close to the 

 wings as possible. The bait is then allowecf to float down the 

 stream just below the surface, then gently drawn up again with a 

 gentle degree of irregularity effected by the shaking of the rod; 

 and some fishermen maintain that if there be a trout in the place 

 it will be sure to take it. Some place two caddis with the wings. 



