274 MY SPORTING HOLIDAYS 



in weight gave capital sport during July, August, and 

 September. 



On one occasion, fishing for three days towards the 

 end of July, I landed about 100 of our reservoir trout, 

 averaging over 1 pound in weight. They ran and 

 leapt continually when hooked, and generally played 

 stronger and showed more vitality than any ordinary 

 brown trout of a similar size I have ever caught, 

 either in Norway or Scotland. 



Another lot of 500 two-year-old trout from the 

 same fishery company were subsequently turned in, 

 this time in March. These grew even more rapidly 

 than the yearling fry, and afforded similar good fish- 

 ing for two or three years after. Our experience of 

 this reservoir has been that after the third year, when 

 the fish are 3 pounds in weight and upwards, they do 

 not rise so readily to the fly, though occasionally they 

 will take a Devon minnow fairly well in the autumn. 

 The bottom feeding in the reservoir is good and 

 plentiful, and no doubt after a certain age these trout 

 get fat and lazy, and so are less inclined for surface 

 feeding. 



I have given these brief particulars of what has 

 proved a most successful experiment, thinking that 

 they may be of interest to my angling readers. 



It may be idle to speculate why the monks of old, 

 before steam transit and developed sea-fisheries placed 

 cheap sea-fish on everybody's breakfast-table, used to 

 stock their ponds with coarse fish like perch, roach, 

 carp, and bream, as well as that pernicious fresh^ 

 water shark, the pike. Rainbow-trout were in those 

 days, doubtless, unknown. But the ordinary brown 

 trout of the British Isles were then available, one 

 would have thought, and might well have been used 



