DAYS WITH BASS 



thought it just worth while ordering my boatman to row round 

 the buoy in the direction previously taken by the bass. If it 

 were, by good luck, still on the hook, this would certainly un- 

 wind the line. Next moment the reel sang its requiem, for 

 it made a wild dash upstream and was in the great landing- 

 net ten minutes later. Next morning, about five o'clock, I 

 was into the other, and realised at once that here was some- 

 thing even heavier than my prize of the day before. What 

 made its capture even more problematical was the fact of my 

 having hooked it close to the bridge, at the very end of the drift. 

 It should be explained that in those days (this best of all methods 

 has, I regret to say, gone out of fashion in the river Teign) 

 the boats used to drift in line from the shipping to the bridge, 

 ascending on the rising tide in midstream and returning through 

 the shallows, where the tide ran more gently, so as to go over 

 the ground once more. This style of drifting was admirably 

 adapted to the greatest happiness of the greatest number in 

 that limited area, since every bait passed in turn over the fish, 

 though some used to pay out only twenty or thirty yards of 

 line, while others, like myself, would, on exceptionally hot, 

 clear days, pay out fifty or sixty. Nowadays, it is the fashion 

 to anchor the boats here, there and everywhere, either dis- 

 pensing with the services of a boatman, or allowing htm to sit 

 at his ease and smoke his pipe, instead of working for the fish 

 as he used cheerfully to do. Either is sufficiently suggestive 

 of an age vowed to mean economies and democracy gone 

 mad to induce in me a preference for living in these happier 

 memories of other days. 



Well, to return to my second bass, which I left just as he 



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