188 THE COMPLETE ANGLER. 



HUFFE, 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 Pater-noster 

 line ;* that is, six or eight very small hooks tied along the 



* A rosary, or string of beads, is used by the Roman-Catholic devotees to 

 assist them in numbering their pater-nosters, or prayers,- a line with many 

 hooks at small distances from each other, though it little resembles a string of 

 beads, is thence called a pater-noster line. H. 



[Every tenth bead on a rosary is larger than the others, so that when the 

 devotee comes to it with his lingers, touching this large bead at the end of each 

 tenth pater-noster, or Lord's prayer, he knows without the trouble of counting 

 or looking, that he has repeated the prayers ten times. A rosary consists of 



