190 THE SALT OF MY LIFE 



go back in time for a dip from the pier head before 

 breakfast. Other boats are out now, half a dozen 

 of them ; and the charm of the earlier solitude is 

 gone. Thirty inches that bass measured when 

 we got him against the tape, and for the last three 

 years he has reposed in a glass case along with a 

 brother in misfortune, his inferior by a couple of 

 pounds, which I had caught with the same hook 

 the morning before. The hook is enshrined with 

 them of which it was the undoing. 



Mornings like this, and evenings too, with 

 smaller game to my score, I must have spent a 

 couple of hundred, most of the mornings in the 

 congenial company of G. H. J., who, ever in de- 

 mand as a healer of the sick, was debarred from 

 fishing the later tides. The evenings are as the 

 mornings, only the folk that lie abed for sunrise 

 are awake at sunset, and we get much of the society 

 that we do not yearn for. Glancing at the actual 

 diaries that have inspired this reminiscence, I 

 find that in the two summers of 1902 and 1904 

 my fishing in 1903 was continually interrupted 

 by a tour, which I made of all the fishery ports of 

 England and Wales my total catch of sizeable 

 bass (not reckoning the small fry) amounted to 

 29 in the former and 49 in the latter year. This 

 reads like a small total when one concentrates 

 attention . on one fish, but it must in fairness be 

 remembered that fishing was done only in the 



