A BOOK OF FISHING STORIES 



these big bass that took my Hving sand eel with a rush and made 

 the rod to bend and the reel to scream as they frantically tried 

 to make for the bridge, while I as earnestly endeavoured to 

 keep them in the safer waters below. Most often I went forth 

 alone, though occasionally my wife would accompany me and 

 usually get the best fish. It would be false modesty to insist 

 that she knew more of the game than I, yet the balance of the 

 catch almost invariably went in her favour. Indeed, it is usually 

 the novice that scores. I well remember one morning of July, 

 many years ago, on which that most delightful of actors, Cyril 

 Maude, was with me in the boat. Maude is by no means an in- 

 experienced fisher of trouts, but at that time he scarcely knew 

 a bass from a barbel. Yet, within the first few minutes, he 

 hooked and killed a five-pounder, and it was the only fish of 

 the day worth keeping. Not that I have any reason to com- 

 plain of my luck with bass in that estuary or elsewhere. The 

 best two Teign fish that ever tried my tackle were caught on 

 consecutive July mornings, each by a stroke of good luck that is 

 unforgettable ; and as one of them weighed just over eleven 

 pounds, and the other nine, they were worth catching by hook 

 or by crook. Well, it was mostly by crook. The first of them, 

 having snatched forty or fifty yards of line off my reel at the 

 first rush, took it into its scaly head to swim once round 

 the chain of one of the buoys that mark the moorings of 

 vessels lying in midstream. It seemed, in that sickening 

 moment in which the pull of the fish was no longer felt, as if 

 a bass of such size must, with the help of a tide running many 

 knots an hour, have snapped the single salmon gut and gone 

 adrift ; but, without any great hope of a different result, I 



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