A BOOK OF FISHING STORIES 



is offered in so many words, though it will not be found lacking 

 for those who trouble to read between the lines. Doctors 

 often write in their prescriptions, Dearg. piL, let the pill be 

 coated with silver ; and so, throughout these pages, dogma is 

 so thickly wrapped in anecdote as should be palatable even to 

 the expert. The printed art and science of the sport are already 

 set down in volumes enough and to spare. Comprehensive 

 works like the Encyclopcedia of Sport, the Badminton Library 

 and the Country Life and Haddon Hall volumes epitomise the 

 whole range of sport with rod and line, and scores of lesser 

 books cover in detail the higher arts of fly-fishing, as well 

 as more homely angling from punt or pier. 



The addition of yet another tome of the same kind would 

 have called for more abject apology than need, perhaps, be 

 offered for a work planned on wholly different lines. Re- 

 miniscence, not instruction, is the theme of those who have been 

 so good as to contribute to these pages, and one chapter only 

 is not in the nature of anecdote. Yet those who follow the 

 valuable suggestions embodied in Sir Herbert Maxwell's 

 contribution on the improvement of trout fisheries will, 

 it is confidently hoped, welcome it, though departing from 

 the model of the rest, with complete satisfaction. The trout 

 fisherman, alone among lovers of the angle, is increasingly 

 confronted with the pressing problems of restocking and other- 

 wise improving the rivers and lakes to which he looks for his 

 sport. The case of salmon rivers is different, since jhe salmon 

 is a restless wanderer — here to-day and gone to-morrow — and 

 no scheme of restocking hitherto devised, no matter how lavish 



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