Lines in Pleasant Places | Page 9

said
'twould do, but a five-pound note, he supposed, would buy the lot. "No
doubt," replied S., "but to me 'tis a cosy nest for anglers."
The fishing, however, was the first consideration, and with a sense of
satisfaction induced by good quarters out went the anglers, across
meadows, by the banks of a river. It was fine fun to help the
lock-keeper with his cast-net and store the bait-can with gudgeons and
minnows, and to crack jokes before the tumbling and rumbling weir,
with its deep, wide pool, high banks around, and overhanging bushes.
Serton, electing for a little Waltonian luxury, sat him down in comfort,
plumbed a hard bottom in six feet of water, caught a dace at the first
swim, and, with his cockney-bred maggots, took five others in
succession--three roach, and a bleak which he reported in town, at the

Bottle's Head, as the largest ever seen.
Meanwhile M., who was paternostering with worm and minnow, came
down to inform S. that he had already landed four perch, and that the
shoal was still unfrightened. With a recommendation to his friend to do
likewise, he returned to his station, and his basketed perch might soon
have recited, "Master, we are seven." Thereabouts a shout from S.
made the welkin ring; he cried aloud for help, and M. sprinted along in
time to save the fine tackle by netting a big chub. From the merry style
of the beginning, the captor had felt assured of more roach, and now
confessed that they and dace had ceased biting, though he had used
paste and maggot alternately. Then he took to small red worm and
angled forth a dish of fat gudgeon, that would have put a Seine fisher in
raptures. Next he lost a fish by breakage, and while repairing damages
was arrested by a distant summons from his companion, whom he
discovered wrestling with something--no perch, however--that had
gained the further side of the pool, and was now heading remorselessly
for the apron of the weir, under which it fouled and freed. The
witnesses of the defeat were probably right in their conclusion that this
was the aged black trout that had become a legend, and was believed to
be the only trout left in those parts.
During the afternoon M. and S., in peaceful brotherhood, sat over the
pool, plied paternoster and roach pole, and fished till the float could be
no more identified in the dusk. They carried to the cottage each ten or
twelve pounds' weight extra in fish caught, but in his memories of the
homeward walk S. must have been mistaken in his eloquent reference
to the crake of the landrail, though he might have been correct as to the
weak, piping cry of the circling bats, and the ghostly passage of flitting
owl mousing low over the meadow. These alone, he said, broke the
silence; in this M. took him to task, having himself heard the tinkling of
sheep bells and the barking of the shepherd's dog.
Next morning the anglers were somewhat put out at first at the
necessity of fulfilling an engagement with the keeper, being reminded
of the promise by the appearance of a shock-headed youth in the
cottage garden, staggering under two sacks. M. was better versed in

these things than the other, and able to inform him that this meant
rabbiting; here were the nets and the ferrets, and he had undertaken to
stand by with the single-barrel and see fair play. Ferreting is a business
generally transacted without hustle, and the keeper was a noted
slowcoach. With this knowledge, and the presence under his eye of a
basket containing ground-bait kneaded in the woodhouse while the
breakfast rashers were frying, S. opined that he might snatch an hour or
so of honest reaching in the backwater while the rabbit people were
getting ready.
The roach master eventually came to the rendezvous, indeed, with a
dozen and five of those beautifully graded roach which are between
three-quarters and half pound, and which, when they are "on the feed,"
run marvellously even in size and quality. M. did not now concern
himself about the roach. He was no longer a Waltonian; his mind had
taken the tone of the keeper's. Yesterday his soul was of the fish, fishy;
to-day it was full of muzzle-loaders, nets, and ferrets. But he, too, had
his reward, and S. noticed that as they plodded athwart a fallow he
looked out keenly and knowingly for feathered or four-footed game as
if he were Colonel Hawker in person, and not the patient paternosterer
with downcast eye. After S. had witnessed his bright eye and
upstanding boldness when he brought the single-barrel to shoulder and
dropped a gloriously burnished woodpigeon at long shot, he conceived
an