PISCATORIAL.

Otago Witness, Issue 181, 6 August 1886, Page 25

PISCATORIAL.

Angling for Trout.

Only constant practice from youth upwards will enable a man with a keen eye and a ready hand and limitless patience and the temper of a saint to catch trout in chalk streams. To make the attempt without these qualifications is only te reap disappointment and to increase the duties, already onerous, of the Recording Angel. For example, you go down to the Kennet at Hungerford, and approach (having obtained permission) a stream between high -grass banks, a stream as clear as air and as smooth as a millpond. You see a trout rising under the near bank, and you come on kneeling (as the characters in " The Critic " "go off ") till you are within a long cast of him. Then you try to make your cast ; but the fly catches behind you on a piece of hay ora daisy or what not. You must crawl back and disengage the fly, and this may go on an indefinite time. When you do make your cast, you probably foul the bank, or your, fly falls with a splash, and a ripple all along the top of the water shows you the trout literally " making tracks " to tell his neighbours that an amateur is out for a day's fishing. The tribulations of the inexpert dry-fly fisher are simply numberless. He cannot keep his fly dry, he catches in every tree as he flicks it to dry it ; he loses sight of it on the water, and devoutly watches any small floating object, under the delusion that it is his own black gnat. Finally if he does chan ce to raise a fish, he never can hook it, he cannot land it, and altogether it were better to be shooting capercailzies. Then your fury at. seeing so many big trout, and not being able to catch them, brings you to a frantic state of mind when you could vote for a Gladstonian out of mere bitterness and with a general desire to hasten the final catastrophe and destruction of all things. — Saturday Review.

Anglers know well that the voracious pike is a fish most tenacious of life, and that hours after he has lain in the fishing-creel apparently dead, he is quite capable of giving a snap with his sharp teeth. But few are aware how long a pike will live out of his proper element. A Paris fishmonger recently received a qnantity of fish from Rotterdam which were packed in ice. Among these was a pike over two feet long, which, on unpacking, was seen slightly to move its gills. The fish was placed in fresh water, with the result that in a few hours it was fully alive and very active. This fish, as far as can be learnt, was actually out of the water three days, during which time it travelled nearly three hundred miles. It is now in the Trocadero Aquarium, and seems to have fully recovered from its ourious experience.