308 SALMON AND TROUT. 
He was turned loose again after a hasty weighing ; but he had 
seen his best days, and in the following season was finally 
drawn out a mere living skeleton. Under the circumstances 
we can hardly ‘wonder a great trout should decline.’ The 
wonder lay in the dimensions he actually attained. 
In another case I stocked with tiny trout, caught with the 
hand from the very smallest of Kentish brooks, a little pool of 
about twelve yards by five, formed merely for picturesque effect 
in the beautiful grounds of ‘The Hollands,’ near Tunbridge 
Wells. Here there was a sort of feeder, but so small that an 
ordinary pitcher might during nine months of the year have 
received all that flowed in the course of a minute from the 
‘little Naiad’s impoverished urn.’ In the third year afterwards 
I tried the pond thus fed with extemporised tackle—a hazel 
stick, a line of Irish thread, and a glass minnow which happened 
to be travelling in my portmanteau. In less than half an hour 
I took two trout weighing 14 1b. each ; both well fed, handsome 
fish, firm and pink-fleshed. 
I mention these facts because I would fain see trout more 
generally introduced into ornamental waters. For instance, I 
feel assured that the sheet of water in Battersea Park, if judi- 
ciously stocked with small fish from a small stream, would carry 
a good head of trout, whose movements would divert many a 
toiling artisan, unused to any nobler fish than a half-grown 
rudd. There are many of our canals in which trout might thrive, 
Within a few fields of the Driffield Beck a notable example 
may be seen in a canal connecting the town of Driffield with 
the Humber. Oddly enough, the natives always call it ‘the 
River.’ 
Some forty-five years ago, in very bad fishing weather, I 
wanted to carry home to Hull an extra lot of fish, and thought 
I would try the river head at an hour when, according to my ex- 
perience, brook trout are hardly awake. I took a fair stock of 
minnows with me, and made my first cast in the morning twi- 
light, soon after four o’clock. Between that hour and seven I got 
three and a half brace of trout, averaging more than a pound and. 
