ashing and
gallant foe, worthy of the finest steel tempered at Kendal or Redditch.
No other fish leaps so desperately out of the water in its efforts to
escape, or puts so many artful dodges into execution, forcing the
angler with his arched rod and sensitive winch to meet wile with wile,
and determination with a firmness of which gentleness is the warp and
woof. While it lasts, and when the fish are in a sporting humour,
there is nothing more exciting than sea-trout angling. Perhaps for
briskness of sport one ought to bracket with it the Mayfly carnival of
the non-tidal trout streams in the generally hot days of early June,
when the English meadows are in all their glory, and the fish for a few
days cast shyness to the green and grey drakes and run a fatal riot in
their annual gormandising.

The greatest happiness for the greatest number in angling, I suppose,
must be credited to the patient disciples of Izaak Walton who take
their sport at their ease by the margins, or afloat on the bosom, of
the slow-running rivers which come under the regulations of what is
known as the Mundella Act. They are mostly the home of the coarse fish
of the British waters--pike, perch, roach, dace, chub, barbel, and the
rest. Some of them also hold trout and one or two salmon in their
season. They yield little of the kind of sport that gives the exercise
which I have made my theme as an excuse for, and recommendation of,
angling. But the humbler practices of angling with modest tackle and
homely baits take thousands of working people into the country, and if
sitting on a box or basket, or in the Windsor chair of a punt on Thames
or Lea does not involve physical exertion of a positive kind, it means
fresh air, rural sights and sounds, and the tranquil rest which after
all is the best holiday for the day-by-day toiler.

CHAPTER II

MANFORD AND SERTON'S COSY NEST

It would be interesting to know who invented the phrase "Cockney
Sportsman"; we may fairly conclude, at any rate, that _The Pickwick
Papers_, backed persistently by _Punch_, gave it a firm riveting. It
applied perhaps more to the man with the gun than the rod, though the
most telling illustration was the immortal Briggs and his barking pike.
The term of contempt has long lost its sting, though it still holds
lightly. The angler of that ilk fifty years ago, as I can well
remember, for all his cockneyism, worked hard for his sport, and
enjoyed a fair amount of it.