Chapt. vi. Contributions thankfully received. 93 



vast area as Hindustan, a list made out by any one man 

 must be exceedingly meagre, and I would suggest that if 

 brothers of the angle would contribute information about 

 the different localities they have tried, we might very 

 soon get together a goodly batch of information, so that 

 new comers from England would be at no loss where to 

 spend a little leave or leisure, and even old hands would 

 find, when transferred by business or pleasure to new 

 localities, that they could tumble better on their legs than 

 they could without this information, and that there were 

 a lot of other fellows besides themselves that "know a 

 "thing or two." To the charitably disposed therefore I 

 make my appeal on behalf of brother anglers.* 



But supposing we have arrived at the river's side at 

 a good locality, where in it are we to find our fish? An 

 old hand does not need to be told, for he knows instinc- 

 tively, though he has never seen the river before in his 

 life. You can tell well enough from the outside of a 

 house whether it is a poor man's cottage or a gentleman's 

 mansion, and if you have an eye for the water, you will 

 be able to make a very shrewd guess as to where the 

 best fish lie. As a rule the swell is to be found in the 

 best house, except in Ireland by the way, where the finest 

 structure in the villages is the poorhouse. But then 

 every thing goes by contraries in "poor auld Ireland" 

 even down to the cereals, for there Paddy raises the riot, 



*My present address is Mangalore, but any communication through 

 my publishers or through Messrs. Arbuthnot & Co., Madras will always 

 find me. 



