6 
NATURE NOTES 
catch the culprits, both by missing some of my fish and finding 
every one in the moat in an unwonted state of timidity and 
restlessness. After spawning, too, they often died. Some, too, 
used to lose their lives by jumping on to the grass. To prevent 
this I put up a railing with wire netting close to the water’s 
edge. 
.\nd here let me say that my experience clashes with the 
common notion that fish instinctively find their way back again 
into the water, if by any chance they leave it. In almost all 
streams the banks slope down to the water’s edge, and should a 
fish become stranded, a few flops take him back to his native 
element by ordinary gravitation. Several of my trout, however, 
have been found dead on the level turf within a foot or two of 
the water’s edge. Here, indeed, was a fair chance for instinct 
to come to the rescue ; but it often did not come. With, then, 
these fruitful sources of loss, the problem was how to replenish 
the stock in water where its occupants allowed no fish of their 
own, or almost any other kind, to live under a quarter of a 
pound weight ; for it is no easy matter to obtain large live trout 
unless one pays through the nose for them. It was solved by 
letting down the water in the upper moat, and getting all the 
fish into the moat below the waterfall. I then cast about for a 
fresh supply, and was given the contents of a tiny pond in a 
garden with a fountain in the middle. After great trouble I 
secured two dozen fish ; but oh ! such fish. They were about 
six inches long, and in such sorry plight that I never set my 
eyes on the like before. They were almost starved “ to death,” 
more lanky in the side than any spent herring, and so weak that 
I feared they could never be got home alive. My ten miles’ 
drive was taken up in pumping air with a pair of bellows into 
the two cans in which the fish were placed. A local stream 
produced a couple of dozen more, and I was well set up. 
It was most interesting watching the progress of my new stock ; 
they throve well and grew enormously, so that in the course of 
about five years one weighed close upon 5 lbs., and many turned 
the scale at half that weight. This big fellow used to go into 
the scales once or twice every year, and had a hook in his mouth 
once only. One day an old fishing acquaintance came to me in 
great glee, saying he had just given a dinner to some kindred 
friends, and had set before them a 5 lb. trout he had caught in 
the stream below my house. “ Bad luck to you all,” was my 
reply, “ you have eaten my big trout which I have been educat- 
ing for years ; he got away a night or two ago.” 
It may be asked how my fish were caught when I wanted to 
weigh them ? I put a cask in the moat and laid it on its side, 
with one end knocked out. This was at once appropriated by the 
master fish as the most eligible spot. When he was wanted I 
turned the cask on end ; a landing net did the rest. In this way 
every fish in the moat could be caught in a very short time. 
But my fish had to be fed, and my entomological proclivities 
