THIRD DAY. 457 



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 it 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 his throat and stomach ; from whence I con- 

 cluded 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 sometimes 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 gray- 

 ling 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. 



