296 THE COMPLETE ANGLER 



CHAPTER XII/ 



OF ANGLING IN THE MIDDLE FOR TROUT OR GRAYLING. 



Piscator. ANGLING in the middle, then, for Trout or 

 Grayling, is of two sorts ; with a Penk, or Minnow, for a Trout ; 

 or with a worm, grub, or cadis, for a Grayling. 



For the first : It is with a Minnow, 'half a foot or a foot 

 within the superficies of the water. And as to the rest that 

 concerns this sort of angling, I shall wholly refer you to Mr 

 Walton's direction, who is undoubtedly the best angler with 

 a Minnow in England ; only, in plain truth, I do not approve 

 of those baits he keeps in salt,* unless where the living ones 

 are not possibly to be had (though I know he frequently kills 

 with them, and, peradventure, more than with any other ; nay, 

 I have seen him refuse a living one for one of them ;) and much 

 Jess for his artificial one ; * for though we do it with a counter- 

 feit fly, methinks 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 1 do 

 believe a Bull-head, with his gill-fins cut off, at some times ol 

 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 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 1 never took a Grayling so, yet a man of mine once 



* See vol. i. p. 99. 



