FLY FISHING FOR TROUT AND GRAYLING. 303 



I used to carry about a score of live minnows in a common 

 soda-water bottle — just the glass carboy on a small scale — which 

 I planted neck upward in my creel, with a notch in the side of 

 the cork to permit free change of air. They never ailed any- 

 thing ' as long as I kept moving ; but if I sat down for a medi- 

 tative weed — and where can this be better enjoyed than in a 

 shady nook by the waterside, ' Propter aqu^e rivum sub ramis 

 arboris altse ' ? — every minnow — out of pure cussedness as it 

 seemed — would sicken in five minutes, and if I failed to notice 

 the first symptoms would be * an unpleasant demp body ' in a 

 quarter of an hour. Like minnow, like trout. 



Some twenty years later, when I had been long familiar 

 with the causes which made repose so fatal to my bait fish, I 

 was actively engaged in a society for preserving the Thames 

 about Marlow. Systematic poaching had made such havoc 

 with those fine streams that a Thames trout had become a rare 

 and almost legendary fish ; and when we had put down our 

 poachers and properly staked the ' ballast holes,' where they 

 murdered our fish with the casting net, we found it necessary 

 to restock the river. I obtained a goodly lot of trout from a 

 Buckinghamshire stream some twenty-five miles distant, and had 

 them brought to Marlow by no better conveyance than open 

 tubs in a common cart, with floating boards to check splashing. 

 The road was luckily a rough one, and the driver had strict 

 orders — to say nothing of an extra fee — to keep continually at 

 a jog trot, that the water might not stagnate. The fish all 

 arrived at the Anglers' Inn, Marlow (long may it flourish !) in 

 perfect health, though sundry of them were large fish, weighing 

 from two to three pounds. Our committee were then sitting, and 

 after a glance at the tubs I went back to join them, taking it for 

 granted that the trout would be at once turned in below the 

 weir, according to instructions previously given. But after 



1 This is not strictly correct. They did occasionally — though why on one 

 day and not on another I could never ascertain — turn red, in which state they 

 were less attractive. But I found that by putting a little river mud into the 

 bottle I could prevent this change, or cure it when it had begun. 



