fish is quite sufficient to keep him off the professor’s hook, angle he never so wisely. For my part, I have often been laughed at for bad sport. Returning from fishing one cold winter’s day, when the jack were not on the run, I met a foxhunter coming home from a run across country. ‘Why,’ said he, ‘Buckland, you never bring home a fish, and you are always fishing: it is very extraordinary.’ ‘Not at all,’ I replied; ‘you are always out hunting, my friend, and I never yet saw you bring home a fox.’

There is a species of harmless monomania peculiar to anglers, which others, who have not been bitten by it, can by no means appreciate. The angler will walk miles, and then fish all day; he will go through all sorts of hardships and difficulties for the sake of catching fish; and when he has got them, and shown them – for this is a great part of the fun – he often does not know what to do with them, unless, of course, he happens, lucky man, to be in a trout or salmon country. Again, there may be often plenty of fish, and they won’t bite; alas, how often does the angler sing this melancholy song! The ­Cockney fish about London have their noses pricked by the hook too often, and know the smell of cobbler’s wax and varnish too well to be caught by anybody who holds a ‘wand’, as the Scots call a fishing rod. Sometimes, however, the fish are ‘all on the feed’. I knew of a party of four who, relying on such news as the above, came to a quiet retreat near Windsor.

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