CHAP. IV.] THE THIRD DAY. 107 



have caught twenty or forty at a standing, that will bite as 

 fast and as freely as minnows : these be by some taken to be 

 young salmons ; but, in those waters they never grow to be 

 bigger than a herring. 



There is also in Kent, near to Canterbury, a trout called 

 there a Fordidge trout, a trout that bears the name of the 

 town where it is usually caught, that is accounted the rarest 

 of fish ; many of them near the bigness of a salmon, but 

 known by their different colour ; and in their best season 

 they cut very white : and none of these have been known to 

 be caught with an angle, unless it were one that w r as caught 

 by Sir George Hastings, 1 an excellent angler, and now with 

 God ; and he hath told me, he thought that trout bit, not 

 for hunger, but wantonness ; and it is the rather to be 

 believed, because both he, then, and many others before him, 

 have been curious to search into their bellies, what the food 

 was by which they lived, and have found out nothing by 

 which they might satisfy their curiosity. 



Concerning which you are to take notice, that it is reported 

 by good authors, that grasshoppers, 2 and some fish have no 



met with. I have, for some years past, offered the Thames fishermen in 

 my neighbourhood, twenty shillings for a skegger, but have not yet had one 

 brought me. They are, I have no doubt, young salmon of the second year, 

 a fish now never caught in the Thames ; ' fpr if the skegger was a distinct 

 fish, why should it have disappeared with the salmon ? Mr. Yarrell, for 

 whose opinion I have the greatest respect, thinks the parr, or samlet, and 

 the skegger, are the same fish ; but I have never found roe in the skegger, 

 and have always met with them of nearly the same size, both in the 

 Thames and the River Wye. Mr. Yarrell' s reasons for his opinion are 

 certainly very strong, but I cannot think them conclusive. ED. 



1 Apparently Sir George Hastings, son and heir of that fine old English 

 gentleman, Henry Hastings, of Woodlands, who died in 1650, at the 

 advanced age of ninety-nine, and whose character is so graphically drawn 

 by Lord Shaftesbury, and inscribed beneath his portrait at Winborne, 

 Dorset. See it printed in Gtent.'s Mag., xxix. p. 160. ED. 



2 It has been said by naturalists particularly by Sir Theodore Mayerne, 

 in an "Epistle to Sir William Paddy," prefixed to the translation of 

 Mouffet's "Insect. Theatr." printed with Topsel's "History of Four-footed 

 Beasts and Serpents " that the grasshopper has no mouth, but a pipe in 

 his breast, through which it sucks the dew, which is its nutriment. There 

 are two sorts, the green and the dun ; some say there is a third, of a 

 yellowish green. They are found in long grass, from June to the end of 

 September, and even in October, if the weather be mild. In the middle of 

 May, you will see, in the joints of rosemary, thistles, and almost all the 

 larger weeds, a white fermented froth, which the country people call 



