Jack and perch
may BE about there. Indeed, I know for a fact that they are. You can
SEE them there in shoals, when you are out for a walk along the banks:
they come and stand half out of the water with their mouths open for
biscuits. And, if you go for a bathe, they crowd round, and get in your
way, and irritate you. But they are not to be "had" by a bit of worm on
the end of a hook, nor anything like it - not they!
I am not a good fisherman myself. I devoted a considerable amount of
attention to the subject at one time, and was getting on, as I thought,
fairly well; but the old hands told me that I should never be any real
good at it, and advised me to give it up. They said that I was an
extremely neat thrower, and that I seemed to have plenty of gumption for
the thing, and quite enough constitutional laziness. But they were sure
I should never make anything of a fisherman. I had not got sufficient
imagination.
They said that as a poet, or a shilling shocker, or a reporter, or
anything of that kind, I might be satisfactory, but that, to gain any
position as a Thames angler, would require more play of fancy, more power
of invention than I appeared to possess.
Some people are under the impression that all that is required to make a
good fisherman is the ability to tell lies easily and without blushing;
but this is a mistake. Mere bald fabrication is useless; the veriest
tyro can manage that. It is in the circumstantial detail, the
embellishing touches of probability, the general air of scrupulous -
almost of pedantic - veracity, that the experienced angler is seen.
Anybody can come in and say, "Oh, I caught fifteen dozen perch yesterday
evening;" or "Last Monday I landed a gudgeon, weighing eighteen pounds,
and measuring three feet from the tip to the tail."
There is no art, no skill, required for that sort of thing. It shows
pluck, but that is all.
No; your accomplished angler would scorn to tell a lie, that way. His
method is a study in itself.
He comes in quietly with his hat on, appropriates the most comfortable
chair, lights his pipe, and commences to puff in silence. He lets the
youngsters brag away for a while, and then, during a momentary lull, he
removes the pipe from his mouth, and remarks, as he knocks the ashes out
against the bars:
"Well, I had a haul on Tuesday evening that it's not much good my telling
anybody about."
"Oh! why's that?" they ask.
"Because I don't expect anybody would believe me if I did," replies the
old fellow calmly, and without even a tinge of bitterness in his tone, as
he refills his pipe, and requests the landlord to bring him three of
Scotch, cold.
There is a pause after this, nobody feeling sufficiently sure of himself
to contradict the old gentleman. So he has to go on by himself without
any encouragement.
"No," he continues thoughtfully; "I shouldn't believe it myself if
anybody told it to me, but it's a fact, for all that. I had been sitting
there all the afternoon and had caught literally nothing - except a few
dozen dace and a score of jack; and I was just about giving it up as a
bad job when I suddenly felt a rather smart pull at the line. I thought
it was another little one, and I went to jerk it up. Hang me, if I could
move the rod! It took me half-an-hour - half-an-hour, sir! - to land
that fish; and every moment I thought the line was going to snap! I
reached him at last, and what do you think it was? A sturgeon! a forty
pound sturgeon! taken on a line, sir! Yes, you may well look surprised -
I'll have another three of Scotch, landlord, please."
And then he goes on to tell of the astonishment of everybody who saw it;
and what his wife said, when he got home, and of what Joe Buggles thought
about it.
I asked the landlord of an inn up the river once, if it did not injure
him, sometimes, listening to the tales that the fishermen about there
told him; and he said:
"Oh, no; not now, sir. It did used to knock me over a bit at first, but,
lor love you! me and the missus we listens to `em all day now. It's what
you're used to, you know. It's what you're used to."
I knew a young man once, he was a most conscientious fellow, and, when he
took to fly-fishing, he determined never to exaggerate his hauls by more
than twenty-five per cent.
"When I have caught forty fish," said he, "then I will tell people that I
have caught fifty, and so on. But I will not lie any more than that,
because it is sinful to lie."
But the twenty-five per cent. plan did not work well at all. He never
was able to use it. The greatest number of fish he ever caught in one
day was three, and you can't add twenty-five per cent. to three - at
least, not in fish.
So he increased his percentage to thirty-three-and-a-third; but that,
again, was awkward, when he had only caught one or two; so, to simplify
matters, he made up his mind to just double the quantity.
He stuck to this arrangement for a couple of months, and then he grew
dissatisfied with it. Nobody believed him when he told them that he only
doubled, and he, therefore, gained no credit that way whatever, while his
moderation put him at a disadvantage among the other anglers.
