his fish, to share her fate. The best fisherman, however, will come
to shame in streams bordered by pollard willows, and among queer
nooks, which can be only fished down-stream. I saw, but the other
day, a fish hooked cleverly enough, by throwing to an inch where he
ought to have been, and indeed was, and from the only point whence
the throw could be made. Out of the water he came, head and tail,
the moment he felt the hook, and showed a fair side over two pounds
weight . . . . and then? Instead of running away, he ran right at
the fisherman, for reasons which were but too patent. Between man
and fish were ten yards of shallow, then a deep weedy shelf, and then
the hole which was his house. And for that weedy shelf the spotted
monarch made, knowing that there he could drag himself clear of the
fly, as perhaps he had done more than once before.

What was to be done? Take him down-stream through the weed? Alas,
on the man's left hand an old pollard leant into the water, barring
all downward movement. Jump in and run round? He had rather to run
back from the bank, from fear of a loose line; the fish was coming at
him so fast that there was no time to wind up. Safe into the weeds
hurls the fish; the man, as soon as he finds the fish stop, jumps in
mid-leg deep, and staggers up to him, in hopes of clearing; finds the
dropper fast in the weeds, and the stretcher, which had been in the
fish's mouth, wantoning somewhere in the depths--Quid plura? Let us
draw a veil over that man's return to shore.

No mortal skill could have killed that fish. Mortal luck (which is
sometimes, as most statesmen know, very great) might have done it, if
the fish had been irretrievably fast hooked; as, per contra, I once
saw a fish of nearly four pounds hooked just above an alder bush, on
the same bank as the angler. The stream was swift: there was a