THE ROACH. 151 



baskets of fish between sunset and dark, catching 

 them even when it was too dark to see the float, 

 tight corking, and feeling the bites. Roach are 

 very susceptible to changes in the water ; the stop- 

 page of a sluice or mill-wheel will frequently put 

 them off the feed. Thus, in a mill-pool I used to 

 fish, I frequently got fish all the time the mill was 

 running ; but directly the millers stopped the 

 water and went to dinner, the roach would cease 

 biting ; I always took care to let my float travel 

 down with the first wave or rush of water from the 

 mill-wheel, and generally caught a roach on the 

 first run down when the bait reached the gravelly 

 shoal at the end of the pool. Roach feed best in 

 sandy or gravelly swims ; they are very clean 

 feeders, liking sweet, freshly made, clean pastes, 

 well scoured worms or gentles, and a carefully 

 mixed groundbait. In the early season, they are 

 to be found in sharp runs of water between weed 

 beds, where they get a plentiful supply of insects 

 or larvae ; when the weeds rot, they move to deeper 

 water, frequenting eddies, mill-pools, and slow- 

 running deeps. In heavy floods, they often i n 

 seem to follow the water. When watching fl ods 

 the river after and during a flood, I have punted 

 over the meadows and found numbers of roach 

 hundreds of yards away from the river itself, the 

 fish splashing in the shallow water and apparently 

 being quite at home amongst cabbage stalks, fences 

 or what not ; and the way they follow the subsiding 

 waters back is little short of the marvellous. It is 

 only where there is a really deep depression in the 

 land that I have found many fish after the subsidence 

 of floods ; when the water is on the land, they may 

 be seen in the most extraordinary places, and 



