SUMMER HOURS ON BREYDON 125 



6.20. Tied the punt to a stump of the old hulk Agnes. 

 In 1876 her hull would have passed for a relic of Nelson's 

 fleet. In Nelson's day she ploughed (slowly enough) the 

 main, bringing fruits and wines from the Straits. Since I 

 have sawn off the old dog figure-head, it would puzzle a 

 novice to tell which was stem and which was stern ! What 

 rare birds have settled on the flat, against which, to block a 

 troublesome creek, she was moored and scuttled avocets, 

 spoonbills, black stork, broad-billed sandpiper, and many 

 another ! 



6.40. Commenced darting. He who picks sets at naught 

 the science, the art, the traditions of angling, and of sporting 

 proper, 50 says Piscator, who will sit a whole tide out and 

 come smiling home with a half-score undersized flounders, 

 and the memory of having hauled out a bushel or two of use- 

 less shore-crabs, whose pincer-claws tore up nine-tenths of 

 the bait poor harmless shrimps, or naked mussels. Yet 

 they term flounder-sticking cruel and barbarous amuse- 

 ment ! They think nothing of impaling a living crustacean 

 on a torturing hook, and having hooked a fish, of leaving 

 the poor thing to die of suffocation. The flounder-sticker 

 spares the shrimp, and hastens the death of his prey by 

 a friendly stab ! You cannot measure sport nor cruelty with 

 a pair of callipers. 



6.42. I had been pondering thus whilst drifting and jab- 

 bing jab ! jab ! jab ! sometimes in muddy ooze where the 

 cross-bar goes deeply in, and comes up heavy with mud ; and 

 then on a shelly bottom, thick with broken valves of clams, 

 the relics of many a generation. Here's a fish ! Up quickly 

 comes the dart, with a fine flounder wriggling on two of the 

 tines ; a sharp crack on the head stuns it, and knocks it on 

 to the floor-boards. 



6.45. Impaled two crabs: one kicking excitedly, the other 

 dead as a stone, the tine having gone through the centre of 

 him. A pin-prick at the sharp apex of his pointed, curled- 

 up tail is at once fatal. The (< heart " lies immediately under 

 here. 



6.50. Jab! jab! jab! We came across a bed of soft 

 weeds thrown in a subterranean heap by some peculiar eddy. 

 We can hardly pull the pick up for the weight that adheres 

 to it. 



