CHAP. III.] THE TIIIRD DAT. 101 



Well, scholar, you see what pains I have taken to recover 

 the lost credit of the poor despised chub. And now I will 

 give you some rules how to catch him : and I am glad to 

 enter you into the art of fishing by catching a chub ; for 

 there is no better fish to enter a young angler, he is so 

 easily caught, but then it must be this particular way. 



Go to the same hole in which I caught my chub ; where, 

 in most hot days, you will find a dozen or twenty chevens 

 floating near the top of the water. Get two or three 

 grasshoppers as you go over the meadow : and get secretly 

 behind the tree, and stand as free from motion as possible. 



Then put a grasshopper on your hook ; and let your hook 

 hang a quarter of a yard short of the water, to which end 

 you must rest your rod on some bough of the tree. But it 

 is likely the chubs will sink down towards the bottom of the 

 water, at the first shadow of your rod : for the chub is the 

 fearfulest of fishes ; and will do so if but a bird flies over 

 him, and makes the least shadow on the water. But they 

 will presently rise up to the top again, and there lie soaring 

 till some shadow affrights them again. I say, when they lie 

 on the top of the water, look out the best chub ; which you, 

 setting yourself in a fit place, may very easily see ; and move 

 your rod, as softly as a snail moves, 1 to that chub you 



1 "No throwing," says Titus, in Black wood's Magazine; "put your 

 bait on as gently as a thief at a public dinner puts his hand in the high 

 sheriff's pocket." 



