'WITH ROD AND LINE 229 



Sometimes, in sheer despair, one of the little company will snatch 

 at the bait more in anger than otherwise. 



This is a bony little fish, and affords a certain amount of sport 

 for one so small, as also does the banded Minnow, which is so 

 voracious that, lighting upon a shoal, one is able to catch them 

 one after the other in quick succession. I baited with caddis 

 and blow-fly larvae in those unregenerate days, and found 

 Mftmows greedily took them, and were thus lured to their doom. 



EIG. 96. MINNOW. 



Happy as were the days which I spent for many years with 

 rod and line, I must now make an open confession to the reader. 

 I have no desire to fish any longer, and have faithfully adhered 

 to a decision I reached some years ago. I love now to watch 

 rather than catch these tenants of our fresh waters, and to learn 

 something of their life histories. I may be hypersensitive, but 

 I cannot nowadays take any part in destroying wild life, either 

 animal or plant, and hold that everything has a right to occupy 

 its place in the economy of Nature. I cannot definitely decide 

 whether fishing is correctly described as a cruel sport, but I do 

 unhesitatingly regard it, in these later years, as a distasteful one, 

 and such as no true lover of Nature can participate in. Although 

 I owe part of my education as a field naturalist to my days with 

 rod and line, I often wish during my maturer years that I had 

 taken no part in such expeditions as I have drawn attention to 

 in this chapter. 



I make a clean breast of it, and confess I am a keen humani- 

 tarian, a lover and keeper of peace, a reveller in quiet country 

 pursuits and pleasures, an admirer of books, and men, and things. 



In " De Profundis," Robert, Lord Lytton, has given us a fish 

 fable in song. It purports to be an agitated conversation between 

 a tiny Tench (what fat " doctors " I have caught at Aldenham 

 Abbey and Sopwell in days gone by !) and an old fat Carp. The 

 tiny Tench was dissatisfied with its lot, and wanted wings, so that 

 it could soar and hover in sweet air, and thus be freed from its 

 stagnant element. The old fat Carp, being more experienced, 



