CHAP. xii. THE THIRD DAY. 243 



peradventure, more than with any other; nay, I have seen 'him 

 refuse a living one for one of them); and much less of his 

 artificial one; for though we do it with a counterfeit fly, me- 

 thinks it should hardly be expected that a man should deceive 

 a fish with a counterfeit fish. Which having said, I shall only 

 add (and that out of my own experience), that I do believe a 

 bull-head, with his gill-fins cut off (at some times of the year 

 especially), to be a much better bait for a trout than a minnow, 

 and a loach much better than that : to prove which I shall only 

 tell you, that I have much oftener taken trouts with a bull-head 

 or a loach in their throats, for there a trout has questionless his 

 first digestion, than a minnow; and that one day especially, 

 having angled a good part of the day with a minnow, and that 

 in as hopeful a day, and as fit a water, as could be wished for 

 that purpose, without raising any one fish ; I at last fell to with 

 the worm, and with that took fourteen in a very -short space : 

 amongst all which there was not, to my remembrance, so much 

 as one that had not a loach or two, and some of them three, 

 four, five, and six loaches, in hi*s t&roat and stomach ; from 

 whence I concluded, that had I angled with that bait, I had 

 made a notable day's work of it. 



But after all, there is a better way of angling with a minnow, 

 than perhaps is fit either to teach or to practise ; to which I 

 shall only add, that a grayling will certainly rise at, and some- 

 times take a minnow, though it will be hard to be believed by 

 any one, who shall consider the littleness of that fish's mouth, 

 very unfit to take so great a bait : but it is affirmed by many, 

 that he will sometimes do it ; and I myself know it to be true ; 

 for though I never took a grayling so, yet a man of mine once 

 did, and within so few paces of me, that I am as certain of it, as 

 I can be of anything I did not see, and, which made it appear 

 the more strange, the grayling was not above eleven inches long. 



I must here also beg leave of your master, and mine, not 

 to controvert, but to tell him that 1 cannot consent to his way 

 of throwing in his rod to an over-grown trout, and afterwards 

 recovering his fish with his tackle. For though I am satisfied 

 he has sometimes done it, because he says so, yet I have found 



