BAITS. ^37 



ness of a pencil and about six inches long in two or three folds 

 of paper, which had better be tied or twisted at the end to 

 prevent the contents escaping. At any time after nine or ten 

 o'clock at night the whole of the adult wasps will be in their hole, 

 and being provided with a fresh-cut sod in cne hand the operator 

 approaches the hole, and having carefully reconnoitred the 

 orifice, lights his squib, and, as soon as it begins to fizz, pushes 

 it down into the hole as far as he can and immediately covers it 

 over with the sod which he had better stand or, at least, trample 

 upon. In five minutes every wasp in the nest will be dead or so 

 stupefied as to be practically so, and the nest, which is usually 

 from -| foot to i^ feet below the surface, and more or less in the 

 shape of a plum pudding, can then be dug out entire with per- 

 fect safety, and the parts of the comb selected which contain 

 the greatest number of grubs. So certain and expeditious is 

 this process that I have taken three or four after dinner, dug 

 them all up, taken what I wanted and filled in the holes in little 

 over half an hour. 



If wasps unduly swarm in the neighbourhood, which I have 

 often known to be the case, they can, by following out the 

 above directions, be easily reduced in numbers, if not almost 

 entirely exterminated. 



Grasshoppers, both sunk and floating, form an excellent bait 

 for chub. I used to employ them successfully under some 

 of the steep clay marl banks about Medmenham. In this case 

 I managed somehow to make the bait sink, but at this moment 

 I cannot exactly recollect the modus operandi adopted ; my 

 impression is that it was with a large shot nipped on to the tip of 

 the hook shank, two or more grasshoppers, according to size, 

 being stuck on below 



Caddis Bait. The caddis-worm the larva of species of 

 the Phryganidce, well known to the fly-fisheris found in great 

 abundance in some streams, and in others it is comparatively rare; 

 In the streams where it is abundant, it probably forms a staple 

 article of fish diet, and tends materially to keeping up a fine 

 breed of trout. There are a great many variet-es of caddis- 



