A fISHERMAX’S NOTES 
205 
“ une pauvre vieille accvonpie," should say “ Ronsard me celehvoit 
qnand fctois jeune." There, too, lived his friend, another old 
Nature-poet, Remy Belleau, who sang so sweetly of the vin- 
tage, and it was, without doubt, the spring breeze wafting the 
fragrance of the cowslips down the sandy Loir, which he recalls 
in his poem to the “ douce haleine,” the gentle breath of April. 
Leonard H. Dudley Buxton. 
A FISHERMAN’S NOTES. 
!W^>^lIKE Kingsley and Magee, I love the riverside and the 
W place of waters. The moss-covered shrine, where the 
spring bubbles forth and the water shrew dives to its 
heart’s content, is just as much a joy as the bends of 
the river where still waters run deep, or the rapids swirl the 
May-fly over the pebbles to the trout below. 
The canal with its flowering rush, the reservoir with its 
wild ducks, the sedgy mere with its great pike and crested 
grebes, the village stream with its old kettles and minnows, I 
have fished them all, and 10,000 fish have gone to feed both 
the hale and the sick of three parishes. The broken worm 
heals, it has no consciousness of pain as we have, the artificial 
fly no one can object to, unless some rare bird, like the Dotterel 
in Northumberland, is unnecessarily sacrificed for a few of its 
feathers — and two instances make me think that fish, though 
they fear the sight of a man at the end of a rod, yet do not feel 
pain to any marked degree. Once, in Hampshire, I broke my 
Stewart tackle with three hooks in a good trout round a snag, 
but half an hour later the same trout came boldly at another 
worm, and after extracting my old hooks from deep in its gullet, 
I fitted the broken cast together again for my companions to 
see. Again, a parson friend of mine, whilst fly-fishing in Dorset, 
got broken by a trout which bored down amongst the iron hooks 
placed at the bottom of the pool to prevent netting. Shortly 
afterwards he was surprised to see a trout still taking May-flies 
at the tail end of the pool : he landed it with his net and found 
it was the one he had lost, ripped open so that it could not 
sink. Where the cruelty comes in is in not killing the fish at 
once, when caught, with a good blow on the head, or, in the 
case of eels, on the tail as well. Let no one imagine that the 
men they see standing like statues by the Nene, or casting and 
casting again and again on Ravensthorpe Reservoir, catch 
nothing — they do — but fishing needs great patience, a thorough 
knowledge of the water and a constant study of wind and 
weather and the habits of the fish. The red-letter days and 
the heavy creel come to us all, as well as the days when no 
art or skill or patience avail us. The biggest fish are the 
