s so much as for people to have no love of
their victuals. Now I chanced to remember that once at the time of
the holidays I had brought dear mother from Tiverton a jar of pickled
loaches, caught by myself in the Lowman river, and baked in the kitchen
oven, with vinegar, a few leaves of bay, and about a dozen pepper-corns.
And mother had said that in all her life she had never tasted anything
fit to be compared with them. Whether she said so good a thing out of
compliment to my skill in catching the fish and cooking them, or whether
she really meant it, is more than I can tell, though I quite believe
the latter, and so would most people who tasted them; at any rate, I
now resolved to get some loaches for her, and do them in the self-same
manner, just to make her eat a bit.

There are many people, even now, who have not come to the right
knowledge what a loach is, and where he lives, and how to catch and
pickle him. And I will not tell them all about it, because if I did,
very likely there would be no loaches left ten or twenty years after the
appearance of this book. A pickled minnow is very good if you catch him
in a stickle, with the scarlet fingers upon him; but I count him no more
than the ropes in beer compared with a loach done properly.

Being resolved to catch some loaches, whatever trouble it cost me, I set
forth without a word to any one, in the forenoon of St. Valentine's
day, 1675-6, I think it must have been. Annie should not come with me,
because the water was too cold; for the winter had been long, and snow
lay here and there in patches in the hollow of the banks, like a lady's
gloves forgotten. And yet the spring was breaking forth, as it always
does in Devonshire, when the turn of the days is over; and though there
was little to see of it, the air was full of feeling.

It puzzles me now, that I remember all those young impressions so,
because I took no heed of them at the time whatever; and yet they
come upon me bright, when nothing else is evident in the gray fog
of experience. I am like an old man gazing at the outside of his
spectacles, and seeing, as he rubs the dust, the image of his grandson
playing at bo-peep with him.

But let me be of any age, I never could forget that day, and how bitter
cold the water was. For I doffed my shoes and hose, and put them into
a bag about my neck; and left my little coat at home, and tied my
shirt-sleeves back to my shoulders. Then I took a three-pronged fork