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 ona 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 ina 
shady nook by the waterside, ‘Propter aque rivum sub ramis 
arboris altze’?—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 pouching 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 heaith, 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, 
