PRACTICAL LESSONS IN THE GENTLE CRAFT. 475 



I approach the subject of live-baiting in fear and 

 trembling, because I am half afraid that its very mention 

 may bring a hurricane about my devoted head, and heaven 

 knows, having had some experience of married life, I don't 

 want that. Still, I know full well that there are scores of 

 people ready to howl indignantly and defiantly against 

 any one even breathing a word about live-baiting in 

 connection with Thames trout-fishing, yet who are the very 

 first to put it in practice when they are clear of the lens of 

 public scrutiny. I live-bait myself, and shall continue to 

 do so, for three very good and sufficient reasons. In the 

 first place I beg to assert that there is ten times more real 

 skill and science displayed in killing a good trout with my 

 live-bait tackle than with all the spinning tackle in the 

 world, because it is fifty times at least more delicate and 

 fragile. In the second place, because, in spite of lamenta- 

 tions with upheld, shocked, and horrified hands, by sundry 

 virtuous and " unco guid " howlers, I fail utterly and 

 entirely to see anything unsportsmanlike in it ; and, for the 

 third, and perhaps most important of all, because I know 

 perfectly well that, good as my chances are in a weir or 

 rough stream with spinning bait, in wide, open, still reaches 

 such as the very biggest trout lie in nowadays, it is at least 

 twenty to one on the live-bait tackle as against that for 

 spinning. Aye, and there is yet another reason, and that 

 not the least of them either. Wherever it is known that a 

 big trout feeds and there is not a trout in the Thames 

 whose home is not spotted to the fraction of an inch there 

 sits day after day either a professional fisherman with a 

 customer, or without one it is quite immaterial which, in 

 the majority of cases or some riverside loafer, whose only 

 mission is to catch that trout by hook or by crook crook 

 preferred and straightway convert his bones and body 



