98 WATERSIDE SKETCHES. 



previous days, they now appeared to throw caution to the 

 winds. As fast as I rebaited, my float disappeared and a 

 fish came to bank. Who shall account for the unaccount- 

 able? The G. C. is in all points a better angler than 

 myself; his tackle was finer and his style of fishing more 

 artistic. Yet, when too dark to see the river we reluctantly 

 reeled up, his bait had not been touched, though half a 

 dozen pike taken in the manner I have described by my 

 rod were hopping about in the grass. It was all the 

 more singular because my friend had thrown his baits into 

 places where fish were visibly moving, and where directly 

 he shifted his position I was instantly successful. 



In July and August there are almost miraculous draughts 

 of fishes amongst the bream in the Ouse. Not a hundred 

 yards from Bedford Bridge there is at least one bream hole 

 out of which sixty pounds of fish have been taken in a 

 morning, and you hear of bream of six pounds. That, 

 however, is an extraordinary weight, but a three-pound fish 

 is not at all uncommon in any part of the river. I must 

 confess to no great respect for the Cyprinus Brama. A 

 fish that is shaped like a bellows, that is as thin as a John 

 Dory, that is as uneatable as the John Dory is delicious, 

 that is capricious in his habits, and that rarely rises at a fly, 

 cannot be termed beautiful or useful to either cook or 

 sportsman. 



In the Ouse country, notwithstanding his bones and 

 general insipidity, the poorer people do eat the bream and 

 like him passing well. At Huntingdon on one of my out- 

 ings by the Ouse the landlady of a small inn served up a 

 breakfast dish which I relished to the extent of absolute 

 consumption. It was a thin fillet of white fish, from which 



