66 THE SALT OF MY LIFE 



Harbour five years earlier, had been at home, 

 where the piers were so crowded with anglers 

 eager to impart information that the listening 

 fishes were as clever then as Rhodes Scholars are 

 to-day. On Warnemunde Pier, however, when, 

 in a couple of hours I took at the first effort nearly 

 sixty good-sized plaice and bullheads, I felt like 

 the First Man ravishing the innocent spoils of 

 Nature. These silly fish were as trusting as tame 

 carp in a pond ; naturally so, for, accustomed 

 only to the rare visits of summer anglers armed 

 with lines as thick as school pencils, they saw only 

 the bait and had no suspicion of treachery. 

 Some of them weighed over 2 Ibs., and, as both 

 plaice and bullheads are long-lived animals, all 

 the best that I took back with me to Rostock, 

 where I was nominally attending chemistry lec- 

 tures at the University, leapt on the kitchen table 

 before being turned into something more admira- 

 ble than they were by Nature. Nor were the fresh- 

 water fishes of that estuary more difficult to lure 

 than their marine neighbours. Four months later, 

 when they had settled their domestic affairs and 

 had come down to the sea to recuperate in the 

 more tonic brackish water of the threshold, I 

 had the yet stranger experience of occasionally 

 catching sea- and river-fish in successive casts, and 

 some of the bream and perch were almost good 

 enough to turn a Thames fisherman in these days 



