50 PIKE AND OTHER COARSE FISH. 



among the weeds, floundering like a great porpoise, while it 

 took a header forwards into a deep hole. 



' We both got a sound ducking, and were rewarded only 

 by shouts of laughter from Pennell, the miller's family, and 

 two policemen, who came with the instinct of their species, and 

 were glad to get something to look at in a country where their 

 exertions are amply rewarded by one prisoner a month. I 

 myself did not care a rap for the wetting I had on all flannel, 

 and soon got dry again. The keeper, however, drew a long 

 face, for he was subject to the " rheumatics," and had put on his 

 water boots in order to keep dry ! ' 



Unluckily river keepers and water bailiffs are not the only 

 sufferers from rheumatism, neuralgia, and the other ills that 

 flesh, or rather 'fish,' bear in their train, and until the fulfilment 

 of the Scotchman's wish that lake and stream were all ' one 

 half Glenlivat,' I fear there is no royal road to escaping them 

 except by a careful use of waders, which are too often considered 

 as inconvenient superfluities by enthusiastic young men in the 



Mid might and flourish of their May. 



The youthful fisherman, and especially the salmon fisher, dis- 

 dains the counsel of older experience, and acts as if for him the 

 'sere and yellow leaf time can never arrive, or if it does, it 

 will be when he is too old any longer to care about wielding 

 the rod. This is of course a double mistake, because, in the 

 first place, we may by reasonable prudence postpone, or by 

 rash foolhardiness ante-date our old age, and in the second no 

 one ever thinks of giving up his favourite sport because Anno 

 Domini tells him he is well on the downhill road of life. On the 

 contrary, the passion oftener than not grows in growing years. 

 * Once an angler always an angler,' has long been proverbial, 

 and are we not all familiar with the half comic, half tragic picture 

 of the old bedridden enthusiast, with his rheumatism-racked 

 legs swathed in blankets, fishing for roach in a tub by the fire- 

 side? Depend upon it many a strong man has had nolens 

 Tolens to lay by his salmon rod and shoulder a crutch instead, 



