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JUNE FISHING.

Of all the months in the British year, we say that 'leafy June ' is the happy time for the angler-for the rational angler, we mean, who follows the sport by way of enjoying the beauties and the pleasures of the country. We own to having slight sympathysave so far as sympathy means compassion-with the enthusiast who fishes simply for the sake of killing, in season and out of season; and a picturesque and most pathetic article might be written on the sorrows of these voluntary martyrs. Some of our readers may remember an old picture in Punch, where an elderly gentleman in greatcoat and heavy throat-mufflers stands shivering behind his fishing-rod over a frozen pond, where the ice has been broken to give play to the bait. A labourer working on the brink hard by, is jarring his shoulders with each concussion of the pickaxe; and the subscription is, 'The pike is a voracious fish and bites very readily in the winter months.' That is undoubtedly an extreme instance of anglomania; and yet we can recall others within our own experience that very nearly parallel it. We have travelled down to Scotland, for example, in the beginning of the year, when the thermometer in the morning had fallen many degrees below freezing; when the winds had been fast screwed in the quarter of the east; when the thickest rugs were in request, and tepid footwarmers at a premium, and when our notion of comfort, fond of fishing as we are, was a cosy arm-chair in a well-warmed library. And the acquaintance who stepped into our carriage on that occasion was a gentleman fast descending the vale of years, who had spent the better part of his life in tropical climates. He shivered beneath his wrappings, and, moreover, he was shaken by a violent cough. Nevertheless, in defiance of death and rheumatism, he was bound for his fishing quarters somewhere above Berwick; for on the morrow the rod-fishing was to open on the Tweed, and no doctor could induce him to miss the beginning of the season. De gustibus non disputandum; but we could not help pitying the enthusiast. Admitting that salmon-fishing ranks with fox-hunting and deerstalking; and sympathizing with the thrill of excitement when a twenty-pounder runs away with your line, we naturally pictured

our venerable friend in the pursuit of his 'pleasure,' twenty-four hours afterwards. Was it really in human nature to enjoy the stinging winds powdered with hail-dust and snow flakes; while the waters of the river rolled 'gurly' and grey, beneath barren banks and lowering heavens. Early spring fishing in Scotland may be all very well for the keeper, who is as weather-proof as one of his own shaggy terriers, who can stroll down from his cottage to the water,' to 'try a cast' when circumstances seem likely to repay him; but as for the man who is tied to take the value out of a highly-rented stretch of stream, he appears to us to court gratuitous torments. May, of course, ought to be an agreeable fishing month; but we know by melancholy experience its too frequent character. After the deceptive weather of some genial days in April, playful nature is taking a bitter revenge. The blossoms of unwary wildflowers are shrivelling on the banks: while the May-fly, with an intelligence that rational beings would do well to imitate, has no idea of putting in a premature appearance. And yet there are men, and valetudinarians, who will go in for their annual spring outing, with a box of cough-lozenges in one pocket balancing the bulging flyhook in the other; and who come home to put themselves in training for the next day's work by supping lightly on water-gruel and plunging the feet in hot water. We might appreciate their resolution were the trout rising freely. But, as a matter of fact, they toil all the day for next to nothing, since even the chronic cold has been caught already. We say nothing of the sufferings of the more adventurous brethren of the craft, who make heavy hauls of salmon in Scandinavia or Labrador, when the air that ought to be limpid is laden with flies, and the sunset is darkened with clouds of mosquitoes. In vain do they muffle their heads in gauze, smearing both face and hands with poisonous decoctions. The venomous mosquitoes will bite in spite of the croton oil; and when the fisherman returns to the haunts of civilization, he seems to be stricken with a loathsome leprosy.

But angling in our English June is a different thing altogether. Then the love of nature tempts you to the country, and you only want some pursuit that shall give a zest to your rambles. For that, there is nothing in the world like fishing; the rod being the young man's best companion, while, like the golfing club, it is a crutch to extreme old age. Even now there is nothing we look back to with so much pleasure as our earliest angling reminis

cences. Our elders were shy of trusting us with a gun; and, indeed, the heavy double-barrel, with its stiff locks, was almost too much for our boyish strength and fingers. But we were at home in handling the light trout rod, or at least we fondly fancied we were, which came to very much the same thing. The prospect of a long spring holiday spent on the banks of some stream in the woodlands, was enough to set our heart beating for a week before, in throbs of blissful anticipation. In those days, we were by no means partial to solitude; but we had quite enough of the fisherman's instinct to be content with a single trusty comrade. Nor as yet had we attempted the refinements of fly-fishing. A short, somewhat stiff rod was our equipment, roughly though strongly spliced where it had been broken in previous adventures. The eve of the eventful day was devoted to researches after bait; to digging up of corpulent worms and brandlings; to investigations beneath cucumberframes, where snakes might lie spawning; to excavations in asparagus beds and richly-manured borders. In the early morning we were up and away, scorning the idea of any regular breakfast. Yet were we far from being so indifferent to creature comforts as to neglect the commissariat. The basket, far heavier than it was likely to be later, was well-packed with substantial bread and meat and the pastry we had wheedled out of friends in the kitchen. Of course, our hopes hung in a measure on the weather. A settled downpour might damp our ardour and send us home sooner than otherwise. But supposing it to be a promising morning, the spirits rose in proportion. The birds were singing or chirping from every bush and tree, busy in their nestbuilding or the subsequent domestic arrangements. Thrushes and blackbirds went tripping across the dewy lawns; as the wood pigeons were cooing from the coppices and the rooks above our heads cawing in the elms. In other circumstances we should have been delayed or diverted by a hundred objects of passing interest. But now we were out upon urgent business; and no stockjobber hurrying to keep an appointment with a syndicate, could more thoroughly realize the value of time. And distance lent enchantment to our hopes; for we were not going to fish in the familiar home-brook, where we had a long-standing acquaintance with each shoal of minnows, but in a famous fishing stream in the adjacent parish. So we brushed the dew from the long grass in the meadows; sought short cuts through the hedges, charging the

weak places at a hand-gallop, and tore our way through the matted covers, scaring rabbits and pheasants from among our feet in the undergrowth. Repeatedly, ere the river was reached, we had to pause and recover breath before starting again; and, once on the brink, not a moment was to be lost, and the rise of a tiny trout, breaking the surface in a succession of rings, set our fingers all a-trembling as we precipitately set up the rod. We are bound to add that enthusiasm would cool down when we signally failed in our well-meant efforts. Though we had sat at the feet of loafing underkeepers and poachers, and had paid far more attention to their instructions than to our studies, we had hardly as yet made satisfactory progress. At any rate we fear we had not the root of the matter in us; nor is perseverance a boyish virtue. To be a successful angler, you should throw your whole soul into each cast, and concentrate the mind on each movement of the line, as if the sudden rise were matter of certainty. How can a light-hearted boy do anything of the kind, when a trial has persuaded him that 'the fish are not moving,' and when his attention is being distracted by a variety of delights. The water-rat will go plunging beneath the shelving bank; the weazel will dart swiftly across his path; the thickets on the banks are sure to be alive with birds, for all birds love to have their haunts within reach of running water; the squirrels are scrambling up the trunks of the trees, peering out with glittering eyes from behind the boughs; you come perhaps upon a merry colony of sand martins, shooting out and in from the face of the sand-bank under the gnarled roots; possibly even the kingfisher flashes by like a gleam from a rainbow, with his blues and purples glancing in the sunlight. There is no sticking to the rod with such temptations. Down it is dropped in a pool beneath the alders, the hooks having been previously baited to salve the conscience; and you have broken away into the thickets on a bird-nesting raid. On you are led, from surprise to surprise, and from pleasure to pleasure. You intrude upon the domestic felicity of couple after couple, that, shrieking or twittering from the adjacent sprays, watch your doings in impotent indignation. There is the common barnlike abode of thrush or blackbird, straw-thatched and mudplastered; the coquettish cottage ornée of the chaffinch, with its silvery intertwining of lichens and feathers; or the sequestered residence of the retiring little wren, seemingly planned rather according to the ambition of the architects than their necessities.

Or, by way of variety, the attention may be attracted by the rushing of the cushat dove's strong pinions over head, as she foolishly gives the alarm by flying away from her nest among the fir-branches. Then up you go, climbing hand-over-hand, setting your feet on the easy steps of the sylvan staircase, in the shape of drooping boughs at regular intervals: and from beneath you can see the glitter of the two white eggs, through the open lacery of the twigs they are resting upon. After a time, a bout of nesting of this kind satiates the cupidity of the most grasping of treasure-seekers; but then, in course, come lunching and bathing, a little more fishing; another dip in a peculiarly inviting-looking pool; a fresh impulse to the fishing from hauling ashore a monster of a quarter of a pound or so; and finally a delicious slumber somewhere in the shade, which sends you in a refreshing pilgrimage through the wonders of dreamland, and has carried you on by the time you are awake again, into the deepening shadows of the evening. It is true that the contents of the basket which hurt the shoulder in the morning, may be weighed by ounces when it is emptied at night; all the same, that outing is a white-lettered day, indelibly engraved on the youthful memory.

And, allowing for the changes in our tastes as we grow older, that we maintain to be the true spirit in which the fisherman should take the field. His pursuit we hold to be but a means to his end, which is enjoyment. It is not given to every man to be an accomplished artist with the brush or the pencil, any more than with the rod; to dash off the venerable mill among the alder bushes, with its lichen-covered wheel, to catch the old church tower to his satisfaction, with the lights and shadows of the embowering foliage: still less to transfer to his block the golden glories of the sunset. Nor can many people find a sustained interest in archæology, reading ancient histories in crumbling stones, prostrating themselves before half-obliterated brasses, or grubbing about in the dimness of crypts and vaults. Even when fairly well primed as to the past of battlefields and feudal fortresses, the charm of historical associations may soon pall upon one. But we believe that, as Washington Irving has remarked in one of the delightful essays in his Sketch Book,' most Englishmen have an undeveloped admiration for Nature, while almost all have secret hankerings after sport. So we believe that same early initiation into fishing to be a valuable part of a liberal education. It not only keeps the

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