OF AN ESSENTIAL FALSITY 221 



it. The mill pool has only once in my 

 experience of it been wholly devoid of rises. 

 This was the occasion. By this time my hunger 

 was enormous. I thought of that chicken. I 

 thought of the four miserable portions into which 

 I could divide it. I thought of its wretched 

 little legs vanishing in three bites of those strong, 

 ravenous jaws that I had bidden all the way from 

 London to its consumption. I thought of our 

 poor housekeeper reduced to buttered eggs. I 

 thought of a great wheaten loaf there was in the 

 larder. And of myself, I thought of myself. I 

 would be host, I would be carver. Whoever 

 was going to be fed it could not be I unless I 

 caught a trout within the next half-hour. 



It was now that the fancy dress of angling 

 suddenly fell away from it, and I knew it for 

 the stark, grim, elemental business it is. I began 

 to think of the fat fishes which inhabit the mill 

 pool in quite unfamiliar terms. They were no 

 longer the ministers of my pleasure. They were 

 no longer there to afford me the opportunity of 

 exhibiting my sportsmanship, my skill in over- 

 coming drag, my capacity to cheat a cross wind, 

 my ability to cock a fly, my cunning in persuading 

 them among the weed beds. They presented 

 themselves to my imagination as pounds of meat, 

 sizzling morsels of pink flesh, builders up of the 



