140 



AUTUMN PIKE FISHING. 



November and DecemLer are favomite months with me 

 for pike fishing — not that I love it much — because at this 

 period the fish take a spinning-bait much more freely than 

 they do later on in the winter. Flooded out of my autumn 

 quarters in Ireland, and driven out of Wales by a series of 

 deluges, there has been nothing for it but to fall back on the 

 lake pike — the rivers have lost themselves for weeks past 

 amono:st the fields ! AVhen neither trout nor salmon are 

 to be caught there are many worse forms of sport than spin- 

 ning, with natural bait, for jack ; especially if you do it 

 artistically with a light twelve-foot rod and a single salmon 

 gut trace, casting in the Thames style. Tliis is a somewhat 

 trying method of fishing to choleric men when done from the 

 bank, because the coils of the slack reel line have a fiendish 

 tendency to attach themselves to every conceivable abomi- 

 nation in the shape of brambles, twigs, and tufts of grass ! 

 The scene of my latest experience of this kind was in. 

 Susses, at the foot of the Southdown Hills. There was a 

 chain of lakes emptying into each other, and forming the 

 source of a little river. The upper and largest of these lakes 

 at one time encircled an ancient and moated castle, of which 

 only a heap of crumbled ruins now remain ; and the moat 

 on the drawbridge side has been filled in. We found the 

 water slightly tinged with a chalky blue — suggestive of 

 lodging-house milk — and the old miller '"lowed it bain't 

 much good going for them greet pikes when the springs be 

 a-running." But the miller's son, " Garge," was not of 

 the same opinion, and he " 'lowed that the guv'nor didn't 

 know nawthing 'bout fishin'," '' Garge " lent us a 

 hand to catch some roach for bait, and put us amongst a 

 shoal of big ones that bit madly. A score of beauties were 

 got in less than half an hour, but they were too large for 



