170 WANDERINGS AND MEMORIES 



fellow who has not some tale to tell within the 

 ken of his own experience that savours of the 

 marvellous, even though it may be perfectly true. 



We have, for instance, the story of Captain 

 Campbell, who, fishing one day with minnow in 

 the Taupo River, New Zealand, played and lost a 

 large trout which broke him. Being tired of fishing 

 he wandered for a mile along the side of the Taupo 

 Lake, where he saw Lord Lewisham engaged in 

 playing a good fish which he had hooked with a 

 " dry " fly. Captain Campbell got out his net and 

 landed the fish, in whose jaw was the identical 

 minnow he had lost twenty minutes before. It 

 appears the trout, after breaking Captain Campbell, 

 had left the river and passed straight for a mile 

 out into the lake, where he had at once taken Lord 

 Lewisham's fly. Now both actors in this curious 

 incident only tell this extraordinary story to such 

 as they hope will believe it. But incredible as it 

 may seem, it is perfectly true. 



Taking into consideration, therefore, the fact that 

 our most veracious tales may be liable to miscon- 

 struction, it requires a certain courage to lay before 

 a public, which I hope is kind, any stories of the 

 lake and river that are slightly out of the normal. 



Andrew Lang used to think there was a great deal 

 of disinterested malevolence in the man who ques- 

 tioned " What have you caught? " when he knew 

 well that the subject was painful to you and that 

 you had caught nothing, and yet the poet himself 

 seems to have caught some of this spirit of malevo- 

 lence when he asserts that the unsuccessful angler — 

 in which category he places himself — is happiest 

 when " watching the skill, or deriving a perverse 



