NORTHUMBERLAND 



one of such a company under such unpromising con- 

 ditions he hardly knows himself. But at any rate the 

 next day he brought his rod and, luckily, his creel and 

 landing-net along on the off chance of catching a trout. 

 He put up a fine cast and two small flies and proceeded 

 to fish down stream, being by the way a great believer 

 in that method. To his amazement he began to catch 

 fish almost at once, and good ones too, and more 

 wonderful still, to shorten the tale, he had one of the 

 days of his life. He filled his basket with beautiful 

 trout from half a pound to a pound in weight, the 

 natives on the bank in the meanwhile plying their lures 

 in vain, and regarding him with amazed disgust. His 

 catch supplied the whole hotel where he was one of a 

 large number of guests, being August time, which 

 makes his good fortune still more remarkable. Even 

 this, however, was not all. It might conceivably have 

 been one of those rare days in which all the fish in the 

 river seem to go mad, but my friend went back the 

 next day and repeated the performance. This was 

 the last occasion on which he saw the river as his time 

 was up. He hopes to return some day ! The French 

 anglers, some of whom with empty baskets watched 

 this astonishing performance, were thunderstruck, and 

 no wonder, and put the Englishman down as a 

 sorcerer ; for the Bretons doubtless believe in such 

 survivals. With the second day they began to show 

 marked signs of disapproval, and tried to frighten 

 him with stories of a malignant bull, and no doubt 

 they breathed freely when they found the magician 

 had really gone. 



It is a quite remarkable instance of how fish that 



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