The tench also grew fast. We sometimes caught them with a hook and line, but by far the greater number were taken in bow-nets. These are nets made in the shape of a large drum, the ends, instead of being flat, opening inwards, leaving at last only a narrow aperture; so that it is easy for a fish to swim into the interior of the drum, but next to impossible for him to find his way out.

The inducement for the tench to enter is a nosegay of bright flowers. This excites their curiosity. Not content with looking at it from the outside, they are never satisfied till they can touch it with their noses. The nosegay is suspended in the middle of the drum, which is sunk in water about its own depth. The tench congregate outside, at first only asking one another what it can be. Presently, some adventurous spirit is overcome by curiosity, and finds his way in; the rest soon follow, and I have taken up a net of this kind, which had been laid down only for one night, with as many as a dozen of these fish within it—all large. Few fish but tench are thus inquisitive. Occasionally, a strong pike will charge the net, and go slap through, thus letting out others as well as himself; but the gentle, timid tench, if left to themselves, hardly ever escape. But

though the pike sometimes broke through our bow-nets, they, in their turn, were deceived by the trimmers. A common black quart-bottle, with ten yards of line twisted round its neck, and then stuck in a notch in the cork, leaving an end of about a foot, is attached to a dead fish, with the shank of a double hook passed through him, the point sticking out on each side of his mouth. The motion of the water makes the bottle bob about, and the bait move as if it were alive. Mr. Pike swallows it, and swims off, little thinking of the fatal evidence to his whereabout that accompanies him in the shape of the bottle. You have only to take up the bottle, haul in the line, and the pike necessarily follows at the end of it. We caught numbers thus, when the water grew too weedy for us to troll.

The carp we never saw again, except on two or three occasions in the summer, when they got into a shallow bay with a narrow neck, which ran out of the mere. Once we were sitting in the library, when the coachman came up to the window in great excitement to say that a whole shoal of large carp were playing about there. We happened to have the old drag-net in the coach-house; so we ran it down in a wheelbarrow; laid it across the neck of the

Carp in Shoal Water.

57

bay, to prevent the return of the fish into the mere; and running into the water, chased the carp about till we caught them with our bare hands. There were about a dozen, all large; one weighed more than nine pounds. I remember throwing myself down upon him, and getting him between my knees; then I seized him, with my thumb in his gills, and bore him out above my head with great splashing and triumph. They very seldom, however, gave us a chance like this, and it was impossible to take them with a hook-they were too shy. We tried over and over again with the most delicate worms and prepared paste, but it was of no use. There was a deep hole in the middle of the mere, and we had reason to believe that the large carp generally lay there, for, except on the occasion when they made the fatal trip to the shallow bay, we never caught even a sight of them in the water. But they served the purpose for which we introduced them into the mere, inasmuch as they kept up a continual supply of little ones for the pike.

I have gone into these details, as perhaps a young reader may be tempted to stock some barren pond in his neighbourhood. Our patience was rewarded; we learned not to

58

Carp in Shoal Water.

despise the day of small things. In a few years after we had put in the first fish, BMere got the credit of being one of the best angling-places for miles around.

-n

DABCHICKS.

ROPERLY, I ought not to call them dabchicks-not at least in capitals,

and at the head of my paper-for the true distinctive English name of the bird is "The Little Grebe." But But "dabchick" is so happily expressive of the habits and appearance of the animal, that it recalls in a moment its nervous jerky motion on the water, and its sudden disappearance with a "flip,” as if, instead of diving, it had unexpectedly jumped down its own throat. Oh! those long spring summer days, when I lay in my punt among the rushes of the mere, and watched the manifold incessant business of its

watery world. The mere, so called, of my youth, and which my brother and I stocked when we were little boys, was a pond of about ten acres, swarming with life above and below its surface. It lay about 200 yards from our house, and, with gently sloping green banks, was skirted on the further side by an irregular belt of trees, among some of whose trunks the