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BAD OPINION OF THE CARP.

mid-water and lower. They are an exceedingly wary fish, therefore never let them see you or anything belonging to you through the waterveluti in speculum. They are cowardly fish, and after a rolling round or two give in.

The yellowish olive carp stands at the head of a very numerous family, giving, in my opinion, no very honourable name to them. They are just as bad a race as the salmon tribe are excellent. If they are of Saxon descent, they are very inferior to our worst Celtic Salmonido. They happily eschew the mountain streams of the Gael, Celt, and ancient Briton. The Dutch waters of our low lands suit their burly bodies best. Neither I nor any one else can tell you how to catch satisfactorily with the angle the pater familias of the

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carp; he is so sly, and nibbles in such a nambypamby way, that he strips the hook of its bait mouse-like. The angler that can catch large carp, Captain Williamson says, 'must possess several qualifications extremely valuable to the angler, and bids fair by general practice to be, according to the old saying, able to teach his master.' All I can tell you is, that you must fish for the carp proper with as fine tackle as you use for the roach, and at the same time it must be stronger, for carp grow to salmon size. The baits are worms, larvæ, grains, pastes, green gentles, and green peas. A sweet paste is perhaps the best. The angling season for carp is from February to October. In stagnant waters they are found in the deepest parts during the spring and autumn, particularly near flood-gates through which water is received and let off. In summer they frequent weed-beds and aquatic plants, and in rivers they are generally found in the still deeps having oozy bottoms, with rushes, reeds, and so forth. Worms are the best baits in spring; gentles and pastes in the summer and autumn. A Huntingdonshire correspondent once wrote to me, that he had a pond well stored with very large carp, and that after seven years' patience with line, rod, and hook, he could not catch one of them. He asked my advice. I told him that it lay in a net.

This mucous blackish olive carp inhabits waters stagnant on a loamy, clayey soil, with a soft muddy bottom. The best baits for tench are red worms, gentles, pastes, caddies, larvæ of all kinds, such as flag-worms, wasp-grubs, and caterpillars. They will also take water and garden snails. Fish close to the bottom, but not on it, particularly if it is a soft, muddy one. Captain Williamson says, "Tench do not swallow a bait very quickly, sometimes holding it in their mouths for a while, therefore give them good time, and let them either keep the float down, or, as is often the case, let them rise with the bait, so as to lay your float on the water. This is an excellent sign, and warrants your striking, but rather gently, lest the fish be only sucking the bait, for he will seldom return after it is drawn from his mouth.' The best time for angling for tench is early and late of mornings and evenings; but they bite freely and all day long during the fall of mild rain in

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warm weather. The tench is said to be an aquatic apothecary-a leech that cures with its slime the wounds of other fish. The pike in consequence respects this submarine Machaon. Gratitude, therefore, is the pike's one virtue, linked with a thousand crimes.

This broad olivaceous carp grows to a very large size in such rivers as the Ouse and the Oundle. Bream are an exceedingly coarse fish, but they bite freely in warm, gloomy, windy weather, and a warm, drizzling rain sharpens their appetites. A small red worm is the best bait for them in the spring; in summer, gentles and salmon-roe. They rise freely at natural flies, particularly the house-fly, bluebottle, and stone-fly, and in the evening at the various sorts of moths.

310

MERITS OF THE GUDGEON.

You must dip for them as cautiously as for chub, keeping carefully out of sight. In bottom-fishing your success will be augmented by ground-baiting with lumps of clay mixed with clotted bullock's blood.

This is a good, game little fish, and the best to initiate the young angler into the art of bottomfishing. The best bait is a very small red worm or a part of one. Hundreds of them are to be caught in the moderately shallow streams of the Thames, and indeed in the shallows of all our mixed rivers. By a mixed river I mean one that is not confined to the production of the salmon tribe, but which produces the carp family and other coarse fish. If you can mud the bottom, that is, cause an artificial discolouration in the water by means of an iron rake, or any other way,