GAFFING. 97 
‘Confound you,’ said I, furious with conflicting emotions, 
‘you’ve made me lose him—a twenty-pounder if he was an 
ounce !’. 
‘Well, what is to be done, sir?’ was the next remark. 
By this time my wrath had cooled down a little and I in- 
stinctively felt in my waistcoat pocket. It was empty. 
‘Unluckily, Edwards,’ I said, ‘I have left my purse behind.’ 
‘Oh! never mind, sir,’ was the reply, ‘everyone knows your 
credit’s good at the Bell}? 
Peccavi ! ‘How sad and mad and badit was’!. . . Ishould 
like to quote—if only to ‘keep myself in countenance ’—the 
confessions of Mr. Thomas Westwood (poet, and author of 
‘Bibliotheca Piscatoria’), which he makes in one of his charming 
angling idyls, the ‘ Lay of the Lea.’ Not that I would 
Drag his frailties from their dread abode, 
but merely that, as he is an old friend of mine, I should like to 
do my best to give his confessions the publicity that I know he 
would desire for them ! 
Bobbing ‘neath the bushes, 
Crouched among the rushes, 
On the rights of Crown and State I’m, alas! encroaching. 
What of that? I know 
My creel will soon o’erflow, 
If a certain Cerberus do not spoil my poaching. 
The ‘certain Cerberus’ being, in fact, the Government 
water bailiff employed to look after the well-known Enfield 
Powder Mills. Still I must say Mr. Westwood’s crime was of a 
far less heinous complexion than mine. He only fished, fairly, 
where—well ‘where he didn’t ought to’—whilst I... but let 
me drop the veil over these sad examples of human depravity, 
and come back to gaffing. , 
The ‘ queerest fish ’ that it ever happened to me—to gaff, I 
was going to say, but I remember that on this occasion it 
chanced to be to net—was a wild duck. Spinning one day 
I. H 
