Washing day.—Fish and fishers.—On the art of angling.—A conscientious
fly-fisher.—A fishy story.
[Picture: Washing line] We stayed two days at Streatley, and got our
clothes washed. We had tried washing them ourselves, in the river,
under George’s superintendence, and it had been a failure. Indeed, it
had been more than a failure, because we were worse off after we had
washed our clothes than we were before. Before we had washed them, they
had been very, very dirty, it is true; but they were just wearable.
_After_ we had washed them—well, the river between Reading and Henley
was much cleaner, after we had washed our clothes in it, than it was
before. All the dirt contained in the river between Reading and Henley,
we collected, during that wash, and worked it into our clothes.
The washerwoman at Streatley said she felt she owed it to herself to
charge us just three times the usual prices for that wash. She said it
had not been like washing, it had been more in the nature of excavating.
We paid the bill without a murmur.
The neighbourhood of Streatley and Goring is a great fishing centre.
There is some excellent fishing to be had here. The river abounds in
pike, roach, dace, gudgeon, and eels, just here; and you can sit and
fish for them all day.
Some people do. They never catch them. I never knew anybody catch
anything, up the Thames, except minnows and dead cats, but that has
nothing to do, of course, with fishing! The local fisherman’s guide
doesn’t say a word about catching anything. All it says is the place
is “a good station for fishing;” and, from what I have seen of the
district, I am quite prepared to bear out this statement.
There is no spot in the world where you can get more fishing, or where
you can fish for a longer period. Some fishermen come here and fish for
a day, and others stop and fish for a month. You can hang on and fish
for a year, if you want to: it will be all the same.
The _Angler’s Guide to the Thames_ says that “jack and perch are also
to be had about here,” but there the _Angler’s Guide_ is wrong. 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.
When he had really caught three small fish, and said he had caught six,
it used to make him quite jealous to hear a man, whom he knew for a
fact had only caught one, going about telling people he had landed two
dozen.
So, eventually, he made one final arrangement with himself, which he
has religiously held to ever since, and that was to count each fish
that he caught as ten, and to assume ten to begin with. For example,
if he did not catch any fish at all, then he said he had caught ten
fish—you could never catch less than ten fish by his system; that was
the foundation of it. Then, if by any chance he really did catch one
fish, he called it twenty, while two fish would count thirty, three
forty, and so on.
It is a simple and easily worked plan, and there has been some talk
lately of its being made use of by the angling fraternity in general.
Indeed, the Committee of the Thames Angler’s Association did recommend
its adoption about two years ago, but some of the older members opposed
it. They said they would consider the idea if the number were doubled,
and each fish counted as twenty.
If ever you have an evening to spare, up the river, I should advise
you to drop into one of the little village inns, and take a seat in
the tap-room. You will be nearly sure to meet one or two old rod-men,
sipping their toddy there, and they will tell you enough fishy stories,
in half an hour, to give you indigestion for a month.
George and I—I don’t know what had become of Harris; he had gone out
and had a shave, early in the afternoon, and had then come back and
spent full forty minutes in pipeclaying his shoes, we had not seen him
since—George and I, therefore, and the dog, left to ourselves, went
for a walk to Wallingford on the second evening, and, coming home, we
called in at a little river-side inn, for a rest, and other things.
We went into the parlour and sat down. There was an old fellow there,
smoking a long clay pipe, and we naturally began chatting.
He told us that it had been a fine day to-day, and we told him that it
had been a fine day yesterday, and then we all told each other that we
thought it would be a fine day to-morrow; and George said the crops
seemed to be coming up nicely.
After that it came out, somehow or other, that we were strangers in the
neighbourhood, and that we were going away the next morning.
[Picture: The trout] Then a pause ensued in the conversation, during
which our eyes wandered round the room. They finally rested upon a
dusty old glass-case, fixed very high up above the chimney-piece, and
containing a trout. It rather fascinated me, that trout; it was such a
monstrous fish. In fact, at first glance, I thought it was a cod.
“Ah!” said the old gentleman, following the direction of my gaze, “fine
fellow that, ain’t he?”
“Quite uncommon,” I murmured; and George asked the old man how much he
thought it weighed.
“Eighteen pounds six ounces,” said our friend, rising and taking down
his coat. “Yes,” he continued, “it wur sixteen year ago, come the third
o’ next month, that I landed him. I caught him just below the bridge
with a minnow. They told me he wur in the river, and I said I’d have
him, and so I did. You don’t see many fish that size about here now,
I’m thinking. Good-night, gentlemen, good-night.”
And out he went, and left us alone.
We could not take our eyes off the fish after that. It really was a
remarkably fine fish. We were still looking at it, when the local
carrier, who had just stopped at the inn, came to the door of the room
with a pot of beer in his hand, and he also looked at the fish.
“Good-sized trout, that,” said George, turning round to him.
“Ah! you may well say that, sir,” replied the man; and then, after a
pull at his beer, he added, “Maybe you wasn’t here, sir, when that fish
was caught?”
“No,” we told him. We were strangers in the neighbourhood.
“Ah!” said the carrier, “then, of course, how should you? It was nearly
five years ago that I caught that trout.”
“Oh! was it you who caught it, then?” said I.
“Yes, sir,” replied the genial old fellow. “I caught him just below the
lock—leastways, what was the lock then—one Friday afternoon; and the
remarkable thing about it is that I caught him with a fly. I’d gone out
pike fishing, bless you, never thinking of a trout, and when I saw that
whopper on the end of my line, blest if it didn’t quite take me aback.
Well, you see, he weighed twenty-six pound. Good-night, gentlemen,
good-night.”
Five minutes afterwards, a third man came in, and described how _he_
had caught it early one morning, with bleak; and then he left, and a
stolid, solemn-looking, middle-aged individual came in, and sat down
over by the window.
None of us spoke for a while; but, at length, George turned to the new
comer, and said:
“I beg your pardon, I hope you will forgive the liberty that we—perfect
strangers in the neighbourhood—are taking, but my friend here and
myself would be so much obliged if you would tell us how you caught
that trout up there.”
“Why, who told you I caught that trout!” was the surprised query.
We said that nobody had told us so, but somehow or other we felt
instinctively that it was he who had done it.
“Well, it’s a most remarkable thing—most remarkable,” answered the
stolid stranger, laughing; “because, as a matter of fact, you are quite
right. I did catch it. But fancy your guessing it like that. Dear me,
it’s really a most remarkable thing.”
And then he went on, and told us how it had taken him half an hour
to land it, and how it had broken his rod. He said he had weighed
it carefully when he reached home, and it had turned the scale at
thirty-four pounds.
He went in his turn, and when he was gone, the landlord came in to us.
We told him the various histories we had heard about his trout, and he
was immensely amused, and we all laughed very heartily.
“Fancy Jim Bates and Joe Muggles and Mr. Jones and old Billy Maunders
all telling you that they had caught it. Ha! ha! ha! Well, that is
good,” said the honest old fellow, laughing heartily. “Yes, they are
the sort to give it _me_, to put up in _my_ parlour, if _they_ had
caught it, they are! Ha! ha! ha!”
And then he told us the real history of the fish. It seemed that he had
caught it himself, years ago, when he was quite a lad; not by any art
or skill, but by that unaccountable luck that appears to always wait
upon a boy when he plays the wag from school, and goes out fishing on a
sunny afternoon, with a bit of string tied on to the end of a tree.
He said that bringing home that trout had saved him from a whacking,
and that even his school-master had said it was worth the rule-of-three
and practice put together.
He was called out of the room at this point, and George and I again
turned our gaze upon the fish.
It really was a most astonishing trout. The more we looked at it, the
more we marvelled at it.
It excited George so much that he climbed up on the back of a chair to
get a better view of it.
And then the chair slipped, and George clutched wildly at the
trout-case to save himself, and down it came with a crash, George and
the chair on top of it.
“You haven’t injured the fish, have you?” I cried in alarm, rushing up.
“I hope not,” said George, rising cautiously and looking about.
But he had. That trout lay shattered into a thousand fragments—I say
a thousand, but they may have only been nine hundred. I did not count
them.
We thought it strange and unaccountable that a stuffed trout should
break up into little pieces like that.
And so it would have been strange and unaccountable, if it had been a
stuffed trout, but it was not.
That trout was plaster-of-Paris.