THE ROACH. 93 



harvest time. Instinct is sometimes stronger than reason, 

 and to be a successful angler we must take lessons from 

 nature herself. Before I have done with this paste fishing 

 for roach, I will just shortly consider a very vexed subject 

 among anglers, and that is, the question of scented pastes. 

 Some say that roach are attracted long distances by scented 

 baits, and grow quite eloquent about the merits of their 

 chemically prepared pastes. Now I could never find out that 

 they ever made a better bag of roach than could first-raie 

 anglers using plain paste. True, we have odd cases of certain 

 individuals who have made a good bag of roach by using these 

 scented pastes, when other anglers in the same water and on 

 the same day have failed to take any, but in the course of my 

 experience I have only dropped across one angler who could 

 do it, and he was an old pensioner living in the fens of 

 Lincolnshire. He used to prepare his paste with something, 

 and certainly it did smell very nice, and I know he has taken 

 great catches of fish out of those large fen drains, but whether 

 it would have acted among the educated roach of the Trent 

 I cannot say. The old man promised to give me the recipe 

 of how it was made, but I suddenly left that part of the 

 world, and when I went back to visit the old man he was 

 laid in the village churchyard. I have tried these scented 

 pastes a time or two, but I must confess that my experiments 

 have not been crowned with a deal of" success. We know 

 that experiments have heen tried and fish have been attracted 

 by chemically flavoured food, but whether they would not 

 have been equally attracted by plain food is not shown. A 

 short time ago a bait was advertised and sold under the name 

 of " Ching," and the advertiser said it would take fish by the 

 bushel, or rather, fish would take it and be caught by the 

 bushel. I know some anglers who bought and tried it, but 

 it turned out a delusion and a snare. I examined a bit and 

 it looked to me to be nothing but a bit of bread, and it smelt 



