Fishing.--Jimmy's Dodge.--Bream-fishing.--Good Sport.--
Fecundity of Fish.--Balance Float.--Fish-hatching.--
Edith Rose.--A Night Sail.
It must not be supposed that the boys neglected that most fascinating of
all sports, fishing. They fished in the broads and rivers whenever they
had an opportunity. Pike, perch, bream, and eels--all were fish that
came to their net; and now that birds' nesting was over they devoted
some special days to the pursuit of the gentle art.
Some years ago, and at the time of my story, the broads were as full as
they could be of coarse fish, especially pike; but by the indiscriminate
use of the net and the destruction of spawning fish, the poachers have
so thinned the water of pike and perch, that the proprietors are
preserving them, and the public are agitating for a close time at
certain seasons of the year, so as to protect the breeding fish. Even at
the present time, however, the bream is so abundant as to afford plenty
of sport to every fisher, however poor he may be. In shape this fish is
something like a pair of bellows and it is commonly met with from one to
five pounds in weight. It swarms in vast shoals and when it is in the
mood for biting, you may catch as many as you like--and more sometimes,
for the bream is not a nice fish to handle; it is covered with thick
glutinous slime, which sticks to and dries on the hands and clothes.
Bream-fishers provide themselves with a cloth, with which to handle the
fish and wipe off the slime.
One morning Frank, while dressing at his open window, looked at the
broad and was surprised to see it dotted with round, bright coloured
objects.
"What can they be?" he said to himself in surprise. "They cannot be
trimmers. They look like bladders, but who would paint bladders red,
blue, green, and yellow? I am going to see."
He dressed rapidly and ran towards the water. Standing on the margin was
Jimmy, his hands in his pockets and a self-satisfied smile on his face.
"What have you been doing Jimmy?" said Frank.
"Oh! I thought you would be astonished. I bought the whole stock of one
of those fellows who sell India-rubber balloons, and I thought I would
have a great haul of fish; so I fastened a line and hook to each balloon
and set them floating before the wind. Don't you think it a grand
dodge?"
"Well, you are a funny fellow. I call it a poaching trick, of which you
ought to be ashamed, Master Jimmy but I suppose you are not. I expect
these balloons will burst directly a big fish pulls them a little under
the water. There goes one now; I saw it disappear,--and there's another,
with a pop you can hear at this distance."
[Illustration: BREAM.]
Jimmy began to look rather blue, and said, "Hadn't we better go off
after them in a boat, or we shall lose all our lines? All we had are
fastened to them."
"Oh, you sinner! you don't mean to say that you have used our
joint-stock lines?"
"Yes, I have."
"Then we had better go out at once."
They got into the punt and rowed off after the toy balloons, which were
floating swiftly before the breeze. The first they came up to had a
small perch on. The next burst just as they reached it, and they saw the
glimmer of a big fish in the water. There were twenty balloons set on
the water, and it took them a long hour's work before they could recover
all that were to be recovered. Out of twenty they only brought in ten.
The rest had burst, and the lines were lost. Of the ten which they
recovered five had small perch on, which were not worth having. So
Jimmy's grand scheme turned out a failure, as so many grand schemes do.
The others chaffed him very much about it, as a punishment for losing
the lines, and for doing anything on his own hook without consulting the
others.
After a wet week in July it was resolved to have a good day's bream
fishing. The broad itself was more adapted for perch and pike, for it
had a clear gravel bottom; and the river was always considered the best
for bream, because its bottom was more muddy, and bream like soft muddy
ground. The boys collected an immense quantity of worms, and taking on
board a bag of grains for ground-bait, they sailed one Friday evening
down to Ranworth and selected a likely spot in the river on the outside
of a curve. They proceeded to bait the place well with grains and worms,
and then went to sleep, with a comfortable certainty of sport on the
morrow.
The white morning dawned and made visible a grey dappled sky, the silent
marsh and the smooth river, off which the mists were slowly creeping.
Small circles marked where the small fish were rising, but all about
where the ground-bait had been put the water was as still as death. The
fish were at the bottom, picking up the last crumbs and greedily wishing
for more.
Frank was the first to rise. "Now then, you lazy fellows, it is time to
begin. There is a soft south wind and the fish are waiting. We will just
run along the bank to have a dip away from our fishing-ground, and then
we will begin."
After their bathe their rods were soon put together. Dick fished with
paste made of new bread and coloured with vermilion. Jimmy had some wasp
grubs, and Frank used worms. They tossed up for stations, and Dick was
posted at the bows, Jimmy, amidships, and Frank at the stern. The hooks
were baited, and the floats were soon floating quietly down the stream.
Frank had a float which gave him a longer swim than his companions. It
was made as follows. The stem of the float was of quill (two joined
together) eight inches long, and was thrust through a small round cork
which was fixed in the middle of it. The upper end of the float was
weighted with shots, so that it lay flat on the water. The weight at the
hook end was so placed, that when a bite took place the float sprang
upright and remained so, this calling attention to the fact of a bite at
a great distance. Frank was thus able to let his float swim down the
river much farther than he could have done with an ordinary one, because
he could distinguish a bite farther off.
Before the floats had completed their first swim, Dick cried "I have a
bite."
"So have I," said Frank.
"And so have I," added Jimmy.
"How absurd," said Frank, as they were all engaged with a fish at the
same time. All three fishes were too large to land without a
landing-net, and Dick held Frank's rod while he helped to land Jimmy's
fish, and then Jimmy helped to land the others.
The fishes were as nearly as possible three pounds each, great
slab-sided things, which gave a few vigorous rushes and then succumbed
quietly to the angler.
And so the sport went on. At every swim one or the other of them had a
bite, and as they did not choose to lose time by using the cloth to
every fish, they were soon covered with the slime off them, which dried
on their white flannels and made them in a pretty mess.
"In what immense numbers these fish must breed," said Dick.
[Illustration: ANGLING.]
"Yes," answered Frank, "fish of this kind lay more eggs than those of
the more bold and rapacious kind, such as the perch and pike. I have
read that 620,000 eggs have been counted in the spawn of a big carp. You
see that so many of the young are destroyed by other fish that this is a
necessary provision of nature. I once saw the artificial breeding of
trout by a way which I have never told you of, and it was most
interesting. It was in Cheshire, where some gentlemen had preserved a
trout-stream and wished to keep up the stock. Into the large stream a
small rivulet ran down a cleft in the bank like a small ravine, and in
this cleft they had built their sheds. The trout-spawn was placed in
troughs which had bottoms made of glass rods side by side, close
enough together to prevent the eggs falling through, but wide enough to
let the water pass through freely. Over these troughs a continual stream
of water was directed. The eggs were pale yellow in colour when alive,
but if one of them became addled or dead it turned white, and it was
then picked off by means of a glass tube, up which it was sucked by the
force of capillary attraction without disturbing the other eggs. By and
by you could see a little dot in the eggs. This got larger and larger
until the covering burst, and the fish came out, with a little
transparent bag bigger than themselves attached to their stomachs. They
ate nothing until this dried up, and they lived upon what they absorbed
out of it. When the fish were about an inch long they were put into
small pools up the brook, where they were watched very carefully by the
keeper, who set traps for rats and herons. Then as they got bigger they
were put into larger pools, and finally into the river."
[Illustration: TROUT.]
"I did not know that water-rats ate fish," said Jimmy.
"No, water-rats don't, although many people think they do. They live
only on vegetable food, and it is a pity to kill them; but the common
rat, which is as often seen by the river side as the other, will eat
fish, or whatever it can get."
It would be tedious to recount the capture of every fish, since one was
so like another. The sport far exceeded their expectations, or anything
they had previously experienced; and before six o'clock in the evening
they had caught over three hundred fishes, big and little, the largest
about five pounds in weight. The total weight was about twelve stone.
Norfolk bream fishers will know that I am not exaggerating.
"I am thoroughly tired of this," said Dick at length; "this is not
sport, it is butchery, especially as we do not know what to do with them
now we have caught them, except to give them to some farmer for manure."
"No," said Frank; "that is why I do not care much for bream fishing, or
any sport where one cannot use the things one kills; but we will give
the best of these fish to old Matthew Cox and his wife, who have nothing
but the parish allowance to live on. I dare say they will be glad enough
of them."
Cox, who was a poor old man scarce able to keep body and soul together,
was glad indeed to have them, but their number puzzled him, until Mrs.
Brett suggested that he should pickle them, and gave him some vinegar
for the purpose.
Contrary to Frank's expectation, the wind had not risen, but towards the
afternoon died away, and with the exception of a shower, so summerlike
that the gnats danced between the rain-drops, the day had been very fine
and calm. When the boys left off fishing the water was as calm as at
five o'clock in the morning, and there was not the slightest chance of
their reaching home that night. This was awkward, as the next day was
Sunday, and they had no change of raiment with them. They made the best
of it, sending a note home by post to explain their absence. In the
morning there was a debate as to whether they should go to church or
not.
"Let us go," said Frank. "No one will know us, so it does not matter
what we have on."
So to church they went, in their dirty white flannels. It was their
intention to sit near the door and try to escape observation, but they
found the back seats of the little church full of children, and a
churchwarden ushered them all the way up the church to the front pew,
which they took. Just before the service began, a lady and gentleman,
and a young lady who was apparently their daughter, came into the large
square pew in which our boys sat, whereupon the tanned cheeks of our
heroes blushed vehemently. The young lady sat opposite Frank, and every
now and then gazed at him curiously. When Frank mustered up courage to
look back at her, he thought he knew the face, and as the sermon
advanced he recollected that it was that of a friend of his sister
Mary's, who had once stayed at his father's house. When they left the
church he went up to her, and taking off his cap, said,
"I beg your pardon, but are you not Miss Rose?"
"Yes, Mr. Merivale, but I thought you would not have remembered me.
Papa, this is Mary Merivale's brother."
Mr. Rose looked rather curiously at Frank and his friends, and Frank at
once answered the unspoken question by saying,
"We are yachting, sir, and we are windbound, without any change of
clothes. We should have been ashamed to come to church if we had thought
we should meet anyone we knew."
"I am very glad to have met you. You and your friends must come and dine
with me," was Mr. Rose's reply.
So, in spite of their slimy-covered clothes and fishy smell, they were
welcomed, and had a pleasant day. Edith Rose was so very pretty and
nice, that Frank began to think Dick was not quite such a goose for
being spoons on his sister, as he had previously thought him.
About ten they returned to the yacht, and found that the wind had risen,
and was blowing tolerably hard. As they were anxious to get back in time
to be with Mr. Meredith on Monday morning, they resolved to sit up until
twelve o'clock and then start homeward. The night was starlight, and
light enough for them to see their way on the water; and as the hands on
their watches pointed to twelve they hoisted sail and glided away
through the grey stillness of the night, beneath the starlit blue of the
midnight sky, with no sound audible save the hissing of the water
curling against their bows, the flapping of the sails as they tacked,
and the occasional cry of a bird in the reeds; and about five o'clock
they arrived home, and turned in on board the yacht for a couple of
hours' sleep before breakfast.