Lines in Pleasant Places | Page 7

the small ephemeridae which are
hatching in the bed and floating down the surface of the stream. As the
trout do not rise until the natural fly appears, and as the hatches of fly
are capricious, there are often weary hours of waiting when the angler
must be perforce inactive. His exercise comes in full measure when the
hour of action does arrive, and he will find some motion even in the
eventless intervals by walking up the river on the look-out for olive dun
or black gnat.
The whipper of the mountain streams, or the wet-fly practitioner who
fishes a river where the trout are not particular in their tastes, is in the
way of exercise the most fortunate of all. He is ever passing from pool
to pool, lightly equipped, changing his scenery every hour, now
whipping in the shadow of overhanging branches, now crouching

behind a mossy crag, and now brushing the sedges of an open section
of the stream. The broad tranquil flow is exchanged for merry ripples
and sparkling shallows, and these are succeeded by strong and
concentrated streams foaming and eddying down a rocky gorge. Trout
here and there are dropped into the pannier from time to time, and it is
a wholesomely tired angler, with a grand appetite and capacities for
sound sleep, who at night will welcome his slippers at the inn.
Sea-trout angling is to me the choicest sport offered by rod and line.
One degree more exacting to arms and legs than the more universal
employment of the pretty 10-foot trout rod with the purely fresh-water
species of the salmonidae, it still falls short of the heavier demands of
the salmon or pike rod. The double-handed rod, the moderately strong
line and collar, and the flies that are a compromise between the March
brown or alder and the Jock Scott or Wilkinson, offer you salmon
fishing in miniature. The sea trout are regular visitors to the rivers
which are honoured by their periodical visits, but they never linger as
long as salmon in the pools, and must be taken on their passage without
shilly-shallying.
A good sea trout on a 14-foot rod, and in a bold run of water fretted by
opposition from hidden rocks and obstinate outstanding boulders, is
game for a king. The exquisitely shaped silver model is a dashing and
gallant foe, worthy of the finest steel tempered at Kendal or Redditch.
No other fish leaps so desperately out of the water in its efforts to
escape, or puts so many artful dodges into execution, forcing the angler
with his arched rod and sensitive winch to meet wile with wile, and
determination with a firmness of which gentleness is the warp and
woof. While it lasts, and when the fish are in a sporting humour, there
is nothing more exciting than sea-trout angling. Perhaps for briskness
of sport one ought to bracket with it the Mayfly carnival of the
non-tidal trout streams in the generally hot days of early June, when the
English meadows are in all their glory, and the fish for a few days cast
shyness to the green and grey drakes and run a fatal riot in their annual
gormandising.
The greatest happiness for the greatest number in angling, I suppose,

must be credited to the patient disciples of Izaak Walton who take their
sport at their ease by the margins, or afloat on the bosom, of the
slow-running rivers which come under the regulations of what is
known as the Mundella Act. They are mostly the home of the coarse
fish of the British waters--pike, perch, roach, dace, chub, barbel, and
the rest. Some of them also hold trout and one or two salmon in their
season. They yield little of the kind of sport that gives the exercise
which I have made my theme as an excuse for, and recommendation of,
angling. But the humbler practices of angling with modest tackle and
homely baits take thousands of working people into the country, and if
sitting on a box or basket, or in the Windsor chair of a punt on Thames
or Lea does not involve physical exertion of a positive kind, it means
fresh air, rural sights and sounds, and the tranquil rest which after all is
the best holiday for the day-by-day toiler.
CHAPTER II
MANFORD AND SERTON'S COSY NEST
It would be interesting to know who invented the phrase "Cockney
Sportsman"; we may fairly conclude, at any rate, that The Pickwick
Papers, backed persistently by Punch, gave it a firm riveting. It applied
perhaps more to the man with the gun than the rod, though the most
telling illustration was the immortal Briggs and his barking pike. The
term of contempt has long lost its sting, though it still holds lightly. The