60 BOTTOM FISHING IN THE NOTTINGHAM STILE. 



All these places should be carefully tried, and it is a good 

 plan to keep the comb from which the grubs have been 

 extracted, and crumble it up a bit, and throw a few small 

 pieces on the surface and watch them as they float down the 

 stream and curl in and out among the eddies, when suddenly 

 there might be a sharp boil against one of them, as a chub rises 

 to the surface to inspect this strange fare ; then throw in half 

 a dozen or so of his ground-bait grubs, and follow these with 

 his carefully prepared hook-bait. On and on goes his float, 

 ten, twenty, thirty yards, with the bait about six inches from 

 the bottom of the river, when like a flash the float shoots out 

 of sight ; then in an instant the rod-point must be swept in 

 the opposite direction, and twang, like the music of harp- 

 strings, sings out the tightening line, as the sport begins in 

 earnest. 



I must impress on the mind of the young angler here that, 

 if he can help it, he must not be any nearer than twenty 

 yards from the place that looks as if it held a chub, and not 

 be afraid to let his float travel down a rattling stream, for 

 there very often the big fish lie, and I have known bags of 

 from twenty to forty chub being made by this bait in a 

 single day's fishing. Chub will also take a lump of paste or 

 a bit of cheese, and the more the cheese smells, or the more 

 gamey it is, the better the chub likes it. A piece the size of 

 a small gooseberry is a very good bait, or a bit of rotten 

 Cheshire cheese mixed with a little bread makes a very 

 good chub bait for a change; even a boiled shrimp will 

 not be refused. A black slug with the belly slit open, so 

 that the white is shown, is also a very good bait for chub at 

 times. 



And now we will look for a few minutes at a bait that is 

 used during the winter, and is in my idea the winter bait par 

 excellence, for chub ; I allude to pith and brains. The pith 

 is the spinal cord of a bullock ; your butcher will draw you 

 a piece out when you want to use it ; the brains are used for 

 ground-bait, they must be washed perfectly clean, and well 

 scalded, or else boiled for a few minutes in a bag. They can 

 then be either chewed and spat out in the river, or else cut 

 up very small with a knife and thrown in. Don't, however, 



