VEXATIONS AND CONSOLATIONS 131 



ing it unworthy of a British sportsman to accept help 

 from boy or man in any shape or form. But the golden 

 days all too soon become the bronze, and maybe iron, 

 and then we naturally pay more attention to trifling 

 comforts and easements than in the happy period of 

 unchastened exuberance. The stage is eventually 

 reached when you will never sling creel or bag to 

 shoulder if another can be found to carry them ; never 

 gaff or net a fish unless obliged in your own interests 

 to do so, or in rendering friendly help to a comrade ; 

 never bow your shoulders to a load which another will 

 bear ; and when, as a matter of course, you will hand 

 over your rod for the keeper to carry as you pass from 

 pool to pool. 



But though you may avoid superfluities, and enter- 

 tain an instinctive horror of effeminate luxuries, there 

 are some things quite necessary. Food comes first. 

 The view of angling taken by comic men in the papers, 

 and satirists out of them, is that eating and drinking 

 are the principal amusement of anglers. The citizen 

 party in a Thames punt on a hot summer day makes 

 it so, very often, no doubt ; and hence the caricatures 

 of anglers who get a very small amount of fishing to an 

 intolerable amount of sack. This is of course a cockney 

 view of what, without offence, I will term a cockney 

 proceeding. In the real angling of the ordinary river 

 districts, I find that as many men wholly neglect their 

 food as think too much about it. This, as I know 

 from culpable personal experience, is a fault. It is, 

 however, a greater fault to waste time in a set meal 

 in the middle of a fishing day. Fortunately a kindred 

 spirit will sympathise with us when the hospitable 

 invitation to come up to the house to lunch is declined 

 with thanks ; but there are times when the duty has 

 to be done, and it often happens that the summons 



