“WHITEBAITING” HOPE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 74, Issue 229, 28 September 1931, Page 6

“WHITEBAITING” HOPE

IT DIES SOMETIMES. A STORY OF THE RIVER. This is the whitebait season—the season of high hope! There is probably only one other expedition which man sets forth which reveals his hopes so prominently in the preparations—collecting wild honey from bees of the bush. In whitebaiting just as in honey collecting, a man sallies forth with at least two billies or jars. His wife doesn’t mink much of him if he takes less. Every move he makes ig charged with hope. One Wanganui man was so fully imbued with prospects for a week-end whitebaiting effort that it worried him all through the night. He was to meet a co-fisherman at 5 a.m. He got up at three, prepared the billies, three in number, looked to his nets ana did all the sundry odd jobs necessary for an undertaking of the sort. He and his friend went, they fished, they joked at first, they saw the sun rise, they heard the birds of spring singing—but the river muddy. .At noon high hopes of the morn were like the green leaves Byron tells of in his poem on the Battle of Waterloo. The trees along the river “waved above them green leaves, dewy with Nature’s tcar-dropfi as they passed. ” They came home with two fish. According to pre-arrangement they took half the spoils each and went to wives with tales of lost hope, of a muddy river and appetites that thought more of “good old ham and eggs than of whitebait anyway.” They had their ham and eggs; one with tho consoling thought that the death of whitebaiting upe was not like the demise of the sort which preceded a search for honey. That usually passed away to the dictates of a sting or two which even the blue-bag could not cope with. Still hope, so Popo said, “springs eternal in the human breast,” and whitebaiting hope, everyone supposes, is like any other variety man knows about.