There is something so deliberate and business-like about it, that it awes one more than a more melodramatic and strenuous method would do. The pike, too, gives a flick with his tail, and lo! he is in front of his prey. He seems to lurch from side to side, and gnash upon him with deliberate, but unhesitating, concentrated malice. There is a cool, hard stab, an intellectual, determined, unmerciful strength put forth, which seems to us altogether devilish in its power and murderousness. Still we must not misread the book of nature, for it is well such deeds should be done swiftly, and with mastery. A bungling rend would be unspeakably more horrible.

When he has gripped his prey the pike turns back to his den, with the same easy motion, unless the hooks have pricked him. Then he may turn flurried or nervous, but it is not until he feels the command of the line that he really gets alarmed. Then sometimes indeed he splashes about, but more often he runs for the weeds, a snag, a stout root, or other protective power, and his compeller has to turn him. If you know the place of course that goes without saying, but if you do not know it, depend upon it

that the pike does, and must be thwarted of his will by faith. When you have turned his first big rush, you keep him ambling up and down, until he wearies of such sentinel duty, and his plunges grow weaker, and you can reel him up. You hit him on the head, and extract the hooks with a disgorger, keeping your fingers carefully outside the great jaws. It is strange how hard he can bite. A half-dead two-pounder will take your finger to the bone. Two pounds more and you will be a finger the less. A six-pounder will amputate two of such, and I verily believe that a twenty-pounder is surgeon enough to excise whatever you may have to lose, if his position be but favourable. The thump on the head, too, merely stuns him for a quarter-of-an-hour, and by no means hastens his end. On the contrary, it prolongs his life, for he lies for a time quiet, with closed gill-covers, and if those who neither know nor fear him, handle him incautiously, he graduates them swiftly and leaves them masters both of fear and knowledge for the future.

A seemingly better form of snap tackle is the girth snap. The bait wears a brace of triangles, as an ass wears his pannier, but a

single hook is caught in the back fin. The girth prevents the gear from breaking loose, at the cast: and the enemy has also a choice of seven hooks, which the Rabbins tell us is the perfect number, and therefore more likely to obtain a blessing. Besides this, we know that the fewer pricks given to the bait the better both for mercy, and business. Was it not the Iron Duke who tried to bind on the bait with elastic bands? Out of humble imitation of him I have lost many valuable and rare dace, until his memory becomes odious to me. I have even, at times, welcomed Heine's views of his buckram character, and haphazard attainments. Let not the less precise reader aim at being a Wellington. We cannot all bend the bow of Ulysses and our lines of Torres Vedras would be punctured as readily as if they were pneumatic tyres.

But to return to our pike. He is the only fish who is capable of Gothic romance. He loves. He is constant. He lives with one wife, not only in the springtime, when a young Jack's fancy lightly turns upon thoughts of love, but daily throughout the year. Like the Provençal troubadours the lover seems to desire a great lady. He is

but a page himself. Madame is of a lordlier, larger build. When you take the happy lovers, one outscales the other often by many pounds. The lesser is Corydon, the lumpier Phyllis. Can it be that the ideals of Girton are realized in this watery world, and that woman will only marry when she may command? Will she only love those who may be obliged to obey, who can at a pinch be even devoured? She treats her swain with a careless indifference, too. She chooses the home. She leads him up dykes and ever narrowing gullies, where it is even wonderful that so large a lady should dare to go. He has to follow at all risks, and the pickerels often find themselves cut off from the main stream because of her rash decisiveness. He is but a moon to her majesty, just Mrs. So-and-So's husband, her junior and her inferior. What do the large males do for wives? They are, it is to be feared, morose bachelors, solitary, disillusioned, misogynist and chaste. My cousin Hilda, infected with some slight smattering of metempsychosis, thinks that it is a merciful deliverance for these sad bulky bachelors to be caught and freed from this Amazonian world of theirs. The large and triumphant ladies, she con

siders, deserve to be caught away from their upstart position, and so we keep happy festival, when either of them comes into our baskets. The poor husband too, one can but suppose, is liable to divorce, if he grows too fast. The lady will exchange him for a smaller one, if he does not limit himself in meats. She demands absolute fidelity, but supplies only that which is relative. In all these matters, we might easily see that some of our advanced women could be transformed into pike in their next incarnation without very much spiritual dislocation. In June the pike is coy. The bashfulness which with us precedes matrimony, with them follows that estate. The matches perhaps upon the terms indicated are not exactly happy. The ditch water must be a poor and unhealthy tipple. Languor invades them. They are lank and squeamish. A ramping dace is small temptation. The spinner has no more attraction than the spinster. It is a month of despondent and morbid moods. Perhaps a diet of juicy water babies, a change of stream, a few weeks in swifter waters, under aerating weeds, is required to give them tone and hope once more. Their lives grow happier as the harvests ripen, and