2o6 
NATURE NOTES 
ones we lose (so we are apt to think), and the ones we do 
capture are sometimes reputed to grow heavier after death, 
so if you want credence as an angler take reliable scales when 
you go a-fishing. Remember the surprises, too. Do not shout 
to the cluster of admirers on the bridge, “ I’m into a big one, ” 
and then slowly lift an ancient boot or an old tin can full of 
mud from the bosom of the village pond — and, again, those 
extraordinary rushes and turns of what you take to be the pike 
of your life may be but the extended frame of an old umbrella ! 
Experientia docet. Newts and fresh-water mussels will at times 
take a worm ; gudgeon and perch a sunk fly ; and once, in a 
shallow pond, I took a half-pound eel hooked in the mouth on a 
“ black gnat.” 
Ah ! those evenings on the Dorset Stour, when the sight of 
the dace rising briskly here and there, a lusty trout furrowing 
amid the myriads of black gnats worked off the day’s visiting, 
with its soothing down of petty quarrels, and its diagnosing and 
disposing of multitudinous symptoms of old age ! These tempt 
my pen to flow freely — but no, let me record some of the sights 
and the surroundings of the fisherman, which outlast all the 
successes. Oxford life makes me think of the families of stoats 
and weasels I have seen swimming the river to gain a shelter 
from the floods in Magdalen Walks, and the hosts of mice which 
had preceded them, or I think of watching a robin greedily 
feeding on a “ lasher ” on fresh-water shrimps, or the many nests 
of reed warblers in the Don’s Walk. The otter at home, with a 
broad path through the grass leading to its cubs’ holt on the 
tiny island in mid-stream ; my fellow-fisherman, the kingfisher, 
several times perching on my rod in front of me; the thieving 
magpie getting the dace out of my linen bag and devouring the 
lot ; or the persistent stoat coming again and again on the mud 
of the river bank at low water on its deadly raid on the water- 
voles’ nursery — these are some of the lessons of the Stour. 
The clear chalk stream Test, with its lordly salmon lying so still 
beneath the bridges above Southampton water, and its biggest 
trout year by year at the mouth of Romsey drain, was a continual 
delight, with wild nature at its best. Or, we go to the North in 
spring to the Rede and the Coquet — on the former we catch 
many trout, but better far to hear and see the “drumming” 
snipe, the redshank, the dipper and the dunlin in their haunts 
with the curfew, the grouse, the blackgame and the golden 
plover. 
On the Coquet we get only one trout between us, but there 
are two pairs of winged plovers, three lesser black-backed 
gulls, and as I go down stream to meet my chum, who is fishing 
up towards me, a moorhen dives and goes up a tributary close 
to my feet, and I notice it uses its wings as well as its feet 
under water. My college chum may be beaten when we com- 
pare our bird lists for the day over the evening pipe. But, no, 
he has seen all that I have, and beaten me by a kestrel and a 
