312 FISHING GOSSIP. 



Say, canst thou tell how eels of moisture breed, 

 Or pike are gendered of the pickerel weed, 

 How carp without the parent seed renew, 

 Or slimy eels are formed of genial dew 2" 



I wish I could be by old Izaak's side, to tell him 

 what various investigations have, since his time, been 

 made in these subjects ; how man has been overhaul- 

 ing the mysteries of nature with the probe of science 

 and the lamp of the microscope. How he would stare 

 to hear of pisciculture, Dutch eel and carp breeding, 

 the French oyster-nurseries, the new salmon and trout 

 fisheries bill, etc. ! I thought of all this as, not many 

 weeks ago, I made a pencil facsimile of the old man's 

 autograph, which he cut on the tomb of his friend 

 Casaubon, in Westminster Abbey. There, in Poet's 

 Corner, still remains the old man's handiwork, and 

 his autograph scratched in the marble "I W 1658." 

 "What," writes a gentleman, commenting on my fac- 

 simile of the old man "what more likely to have 

 occurred than that, after the lapse of years, Walton, 

 then a grey-haired old man of sixty-five, should in one 

 of his retrospective moods have sauntered pensively 

 down the grey aisles of Westminster Abbey into the 

 place of tombs, and that there, seated by the monu- 

 mental slab of Casaubon, while the memories of old 

 days and of good and great friends thronged anew 

 through his heart and made his eyes dim, he should 

 have traced, half-absently, on the stone that simple 



