6 PIKE AND OTHER COARSE FISH. 



Nothing that swims, or walks, or flies does he spare when his 

 appetite is whetted by the sharp wind sweeping 



The half-frozen dyke, 

 That hungers into madness every plunging pike. 



Woe be to his children, or his brother, mother, or cousin, 

 grandchildren or great-grandchildren, should they cross his 

 path ; and I have not the slightest doubt, speaking ichthyo- 

 phageously, if not ichthyologically, that under sufficient provo- 

 cation he would tackle one of his own ancestors, even to the 

 third and fourth generation. This is all ' thorough,' and is in 

 keeping with the grim muzzle and steely grey eyes which fix 

 upon the observer with unwinking and ferocious glare. The 

 very rush and flash with which he takes his prey has in it a 

 fascination, and I have more than once seen a man drop his 

 rod from sheer fright when a pike, that has been stealthily 

 following his bait, suddenly dashes at it by the side of the boat 

 or at the moment it is being lifted out of water. 



The pike, I am happy to say, is daily rising in the estimation 

 of anglers as a game and, in the largest sense of the word, 

 sporting fish. This is partly owing, no doubt, to the difficulty, 

 with an ever-increasing army of anglers, of obtaining decent 

 trout or, still more, salmon fishing (in fact, a good salmon river 

 has now become almost as expensive a luxury as a grouse moor 

 or a deer forest), and partly also because the art is now pursued 

 with greatly improved appliances. 



We live in times in which, as I observed in the first page of 

 the first pamphlet I ever wrote on jack-fishing, no ' well in- 

 formed pike is to be ensnared by such simple devices as those 

 which proved fatal to his progenitors in the good old days of 

 innocence and Izaak Walton, and were we now to sally forth 

 with the trolling gear bequeathed to us by our great grand- 

 fathers of lamented memory, we should expect to see every 

 pike from John o' Groat's to Land's End rise up to repel with 

 scorn the insult off'ered them. No! depend upon it the 

 dwellers in what Tom Hood called the 'Eely places' have 



