WHERE FISH ARE FOUND 323 



Gudgeon are numerous in shallows and at the broad margins, 

 but like that troublesome little fish the ruffe, who also prefers 

 the shoal waters, no one seeks their patronage but would 

 prefer to do without them. Nor does the fisherman by any 

 means appreciate the attentions of a muddy-skinned eel, 

 which has a knack in a very few minutes, if not carefully 

 played, of coiling itself and the line into inextricable knots 

 and kinks. Dace do not favour the broads and rivers, 

 although some are occasionally caught ; but there are 

 survivors from bait-cans thrown after a day's fishing into the 

 water. Hybrids of the bream and roach and other species, 

 under the name of Pomeranian bream, and the like, are met 

 with now and again. Tench are fairly plentiful in some 

 waters, but rarely take the hook : they are more often 

 captured in funnel or ' poke nets ' made with hoops, which 

 are set in out-of-the-way corners. A bunch of gay flowers 

 placed inside the net has the reputation of being an excellent 

 lure. In some ditches and in disused clay-pits they are in 

 some instances abundant. 



These and other species have a pleasant time in broad- 

 land waters, feasting on the abundant pond-life vermes and 

 the larvae of various insects, with which the waters teem. 

 Their joys are broken in upon only by the angler who has 

 no scruples, and the tyrant pike who has an appetite voracious 

 as a shark but an eye that has no sense of proportion : it is 

 by no means an uncommon occurrence for the angler to land 

 a large roach or a rudd whose sides are deeply scored by the 

 teeth of a pike whose voracity was more marked than his 

 sense of judgment. As the angler sits, patient and watchful 

 as a cormorant, or the loafing boatman laggardly drifts with 

 wind or tide, he is not seldom aroused from his reverie by the 

 sudden appearance of a shoal of small fishes that glisten for a 

 moment in the sun, like flying-fishes, and disappear again as 



