144 THE COMPLETE ANGLER. PART i 



RUFFE, a fish that is not known to be in some rivers : he is much 

 like the pearch for his shape, and taken to be better than the 

 pearch, but will not grow to be bigger than a gudgeon. He is 

 an excellent fish, no fish that swims is of a pleasanter taste, and 

 he is also excellent to enter a young angler, for he is a greedy 

 biter; and they will usually lie abundance of them together, in 

 one reserved place, where the water is deep and runs quietly ; 

 and an easy angler, if he has found where they lie, may 

 catch forty or fifty, or sometimes twice as many, at a 

 standing. 



You must fish for him with a small red- worm; and if you bait 

 the ground with earth, it is excellent. 



There is also a bleak, or fresh-water sprat, a fish that is ever 

 in motion, and therefore called by some the river-swallow ; for 

 just as you shall observe the swallow to be most evenings in 

 summer ever in motion, making short and quick turns when he 

 flies to catch flies in the air, by which he lives, so does the bleak 

 at the top of the water. Ausonius would have him called 

 BLEAK from his whitish colour : his back is of a pleasant sad or 

 sea-water green, his belly white and shining as the mountain 

 snow ; and doubtless, though he have the fortune, which virtue 

 has in poor people, to be neglected, yet the bleak ought to be 

 much valued, though we want Allamot salt, and the skill that 

 the Italians have to turn them into anchovies. This fish may be 

 caught with a Paternoster line; that is, six or eight very small 

 hooks tied along the line, one half a foot above thejyther: I 

 have seen five caught thus at one time, and the bait has been 

 gentles, than which none is better. 



Or this fish may be caught with a fine small artificial fly, 

 which is to be of a very sad brown colour, and very small, and 

 the hook answerable. There is no better sport than whipping 

 for bleaks in a boat, or on a bank r in the swift water, in a 

 summer's evening, with a hazel top about five or six foot long, 

 and a line twice the length of the rod. I have heard Sir Henry 

 Wotton say that there be many that in Italy will catch swallows 

 so, or especially mariins ; this bird-angler standing on the top 

 of a steeple to do it, and with a line twice so long as I have 



