THAMES TROUT-FISHING. 429 



power of his bite exceeds that of trout, perch, or even pike. 

 You occasionally take him in paternoster fishing, but far more 

 often you feel one slight pull, and find that he has left you 

 only half a minnow, having secured his morsel by a single, 

 well-directed snap. 



But to continue my subject. There is little to add as to 

 live-baiting for trout. Your gut should be as fine as is con- 

 sistent with reasonable strength, and you will do well to have 

 a single pellet of No. 4 or No. 5 shot, some four feet above 

 your bait, just to steady your trace in the water. 



There is another lure, akin in different ways to the fly and 

 the live-bait, which, skilfully used, will be found very deadly on 

 summer evenings. The fly-minnow can be worked over-hand 

 at long casts, and thrown almost to an inch, and if it falls 

 somewhat more heavily than the artificial fly, the slight ' spang ' 

 with which it drops on the stream, rather increases its attrac- 

 tion for a trout lying in any but the smoothest water. I would 

 not recommend fishing a reach steadily with it, as you might 

 do with the fly; but if you see a rush made to the surface after 

 a bleak or other small fish, and can judge the position of your 

 trout's haunt, 1 within a yard or two, you may cast over him 

 with every chance of success. I have used this lure but rarely, 

 though having good reason to believe in its efficacy, but an 

 angling friend of mine who lived on the river between Bray 

 and Maidenhead, and who fished almost daily during the 

 trouting season, had remarkable sport with it. He assured me 

 that in one year he had killed upwards of thirty trout with the 

 fly-minnow alone. This however was before the wholesale 



netting of that beautiful stretch by Captain J and his 



gang, from the effects of which it has not recovered to this 

 day, though I am assured that it is steadily improving. The 

 depredators proceeded in the most systematic and wholesale 

 manner, first dragging the numerous tenter-hooked stakes by 

 which several miles of the very best part of the river were 



1 ' Holt ' is the word used in the North and West of England ; a slight 

 corruption, no doubt, of the word 'hold.' 



