4 BOTTOM FISHING IIS THE NOTTINGHAM STYLE. 



pools spread the pestilence which walks by night, and rests 

 not by day from its mysterious work of destruction. We 

 heard of young men growing prematurely old, with dirty 

 white and sallow faces, with " dropped wrists," with an ever- 

 present feeling of illness, strange blue lines encircling their 

 teeth, shortness of breath, stooping and bent frames, and of 

 consumption and paralysis. We heard of children driven to 

 the "hulls," to learn to work before they had time to learn 

 to play ; we heard of death in certain trades when the workers 

 reached thirty or thirty-five, and in others, though they lived 

 somewhat longer, they were robbed of twenty or twenty- five 

 years of natural life. All these things make such a picture 

 that we never forget it, and we have or seem to have a vivid 

 conception of the strange results of British freedom and civi- 

 lization, and we could seem to see then baby faces in the 

 agonies of premature death ; sixty-one poor innocents out of a 

 hundred under five years of age dying in one year in Sheffield 

 was a ghastly chorus to the song of that empire on which 

 the sun never sets. But now we find a great change has 

 come over Sheffield, though there is still room for improve- 

 ment. We cannot wonder that the men of Sheffield with 

 such a picture as I have described thrust before their faces, 

 should try by every means in their power to better their con- 

 dition, physically speaking, and we cannot wonder that they 

 should take to fishing to counteract the evils I have just 

 spoken of. But great difficulties lay in the way of the 

 Sheffield anglers. There was no stream near that place in 

 which they could ply, or that fish could live in, and so they 

 had to go further afield, and a vast majority chose the Trent 

 and the Witham as their hunting-ground. In spite, how- 

 ever, of all the difficulties they had to contend with, perhaps 

 in no other town in England has angling and its attendant 

 associations made such rapid progress as in Sheffield ; we hear 

 that there are over two hundred and twenty angling clubs 

 there, and that the anglers themselves have been estimated at 

 nearly ten thousand. This fact alone speaks volumes for the 

 popularity of angling ; the social and sanitary condition of 

 Sheffield have altered for the better since the time of the 

 gloomy picture I have drawn, and one of the brightest signs 



