CHAPTER I 

 FISHES OF MY CHILDHOOD 



CATCHING my first fish ! A never-to-be-forgotten 

 experience ! I do not refer to my very earliest 

 success the catching of a bull-head with bent pin 

 and cotton line in a pond at Hampstead, then a 

 sort of watering-place for London children but 

 to my first achievement as a grown-up child. 



The scene was Bexhill (near Hastings), a 

 primitive village with scant access to the 

 adjoining sea-beach, and ignorant of golf-links, 

 big hotels, and other attractions of a twentieth- 

 century pleasure-resort. Its one street was fronted 

 by the gardens pertaining to queer little thatched 

 houses, whose luxuriant sweet-briar hedges made 

 fragrant the air throughout the long summer 

 days, that to childhood's imagination seemed 

 destined to last for ever, 



We lodged at a cottage where lived the village 

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