82 BOTTOM FISHING IN THE NOTTINGHAM STYLE. 



exhausted your companion should put the landing-net in 

 the water as carefully as possible. You then bring the fish 

 over it, and with a sharp lift you have him. Never dash 

 the net in the water right in front of his nose, or perhaps 

 the sudden fright may make him give an unexpected bolt 

 when you were not prepared for it ; be very cautious in 

 this respect, or you may lose both fish and tackle, and then 

 you will perhaps think of the quotation 



" The waters wild closed o'er the child, 

 And I am left lamenting." 



I inferred a little time back that when the barbel were 

 biting you would catch no dace, and when the dace were 

 feeding you would catch no barbel ; of course, I allude to 

 the two fish in the same swim at the same time. Now, I 

 don't want it to be understood, for a moment, that you 

 never catch the two together, for occasionally dace and 

 barbel are taken together, but I mean it is not a general 

 thing to find the two fish feeding very freely at the same 

 time and in the same swim. I remember once fishing in a 

 good barbel swim a short distance above Newark, with an 

 old friend a capital angler. We had baited the swim 

 properly, and reckoned on a good take of barbel, but that 

 time we had reckoned without our host ; water was right, 

 tackle was right, bait was right, in fact everything was right 

 except the barbel, and they were conspicuous by their 

 absence, for not a single barbel did we take in the 

 two days, but nearly every swim we took a dace ; now I 

 supposed that there were no barbel in the swim or else the 

 dace would not have fed so freely, and I have still every 

 reason to believe I was right in my supposition. On the 

 other hand, I can remember taking half a dozen barbel and 

 the same quantity of dace out of one swim, though as a set 

 off to this I have known good catches of barbel and not a 

 single dace among them. 



When I was first initiated into the mysteries of the Trent 

 and its fish, I supposed, as the barbel was a big fish, I 

 should require very powerful tackle to take it. I had for a 

 companion an old friend with very much the same opinion ; 



