HOW AND WHERE TO SPIN. 101 



spoken of. The river is about forty yards wide and the bottom 

 pretty thickly coated with weeds which, however, form a capital 

 hide for the pike that come up on to these shallows no doubt 

 partly for the purpose of feeding on the young trout that are 

 hatched in the spawning beds above and around. On this piece 

 of water, which belongs to Sir Edward Hulse, when fishing with 

 a friend some years ago, either he or I, I forget which, caught 

 twenty pike in half-an-hour without moving sixty yards from the 

 spot where we commenced. 



About half a mile below this again, opposite the farmhouse, 

 there is another still wider and shallower stretch, perhaps 

 seventy or eighty yards across in the widest part, one of the 

 surest takes for pike on the whole river. A short time ago 

 I caught fifteen pike, most of them small however, out of 

 this water, wading out for the purpose some dozen yards from 

 the shore. Whenever I could manage to make a good cast 

 into the stream, I think I should be within the mark in saying 

 I never failed either to run or to move a fish. How many 

 more I could have gone on catching out of the hundred yards 

 of gravelly shallow in front of me it would be difficult to say, 

 but my baits gave in, and the artificial bait, though moving 

 several, failed to actually touch a single fish. 



This is one of the instances I always call to mind, when 

 considering the efficiency or inefficiency of artificial pike-baits 

 in general. Here was a piece of water literally swarming with 

 pike, evidently on the feed, and where I had been catching 

 or moving the fish at every cast with the natural bait. The 

 artificial bait is substituted, and, presto ! the whole scene 

 changes. Not a pike can be tempted by my carefully prepared 

 Phantom or Archimedian (I believe I tried several varieties) 

 although flaunted before their eyes with a ' damnable iteration ' 

 which one would think would have tempted a run if only from 

 provocativeness. 



Some old author, indeed, would lead us to think that the 

 pike is, par excellence, the irritabile genus of fish society. He 

 says that if a pike refuses a bait when thrown in the proper 



