290 WILD LIFE ON A NORFOLK ESTUARY 



protest, for he makes his nose sore by many a dash at his 

 prison walls ; and he has many a desperate fight with his 

 companions before, smarting and exhausted, he sulkily 

 submits to the situation, and resolves to make the best of 

 circumstances. It is not long ere most of the little victims 

 perish miserably of sour bread crumbs and asphyxiation, the 

 survivors dropping out one by one, until the sturdiest and 

 most vicious of them all is left in solitary state. His prison 

 life is never of long duration, and the boy comes down some 



THE ICHTHYOLOGIST. GREAT NORTHERN DIVER 



morning to see his " pet " a white, rigid, erect-spined corpse, 

 standing on its head. 



Most of the marsh ditches around Yarmouth abound 

 with sticklebacks, save where small and stunted pike eke out 

 a precarious livelihood ; you will seldom find the stickleback 

 there, for Esox lucius has eaten up every one of them, and now 

 depends chiefly on hapless little frogs which, unaware of its 

 presence, plunge into the ditch for a swim-bath. In clear, 

 clean ditches the stickleback thrives and becomes numerous ; 

 even in the shallowest droves may be seen darting away as 

 one's shadow falls on the water. But there are certain 

 ditches on the allotments north of the destructor (between 

 Yarmouth and Caister), where every captured stickleback is 



