312 FISHING GOSSIP. 
Say, canst thou tell how eels of moisture breed, 
Or pike are gendered of the pickerel weed,— 
How carp without the parent seed renew, 
Or slimy eels are formed of genial dew ?” 
I wish I could be by old Izaak’s side, to tell him 
what various investigations have, since his time, been 
made in these subjects ; how man has been overhaul- 
ing the mysteries of nature with the probe of science 
and the lamp of the microscope. How he would stare 
to hear of pisciculture, Dutch eel and carp breeding, 
the French oyster-nurseries, the new salmon and trout 
fisheries bill, ete.! I thought of all this as, not many 
weeks ago, I made a pencil facsimile of the old man’s 
autograph, which he cut on the tomb of his friend 
Casaubon, in Westminster Abbey. There, in Poet’s 
Corner, still remains the old man’s handiwork, and 
his autograph scratched in the marble—“1 W 1658.” 
“ What,” writes a gentleman, commenting on my /ac- 
simile of the old man—‘“ what more likely to have 
occurred than that, after the lapse of years, Walton, 
then a grey-haired old man of sixty-five, should in one 
of his retrospective moods have sauntered pensively 
down the grey aisles of Westminster Abbey into the 
place of tombs, and that there, seated by the monu- 
mental slab of Casaubon, while the memories of old 
days and of good and great friends thronged anew 
through his heart and made his eyes dim, he should 
have traced, half-absently, on the stone that simple 
