Doom, I shall not be abashed as I face their round lidless eyes but shall say "Brethren, I slew you, it is true, but it was a sacrifice to health and peace and to human joy, and for some relief from pain and woe and hunger, and for these objects was it not well to die, fainting upon the green banks?" And they will confess that they ended in a gentle drowning, an euthanasia, for a good cause.

If ever I can steel myself to the ruthless almost bloody action, I shall introduce Aunt Susan to Mr. Cunninghame Graham's Thirteen Stories (Heinemann, 1900). He hates angling and puts his case most seductively, no man better; posing for this paragraph only as a humane creature, who abhors hurting the meanest of his fellow beings, whereas in truth he is planning to vivisect the prejudices out of us all and especially out of Aunt Susan.

"The captain spent his time in harbour fishing uninterestedly, catching great bearded, spiky-finned sea monsters, which he left to die upon the deck. Not that he was hard-hearted, but merely unimaginative, after the way of those who, loving sport for the pleasure it affords themselves, hotly deny that it is cruel, or that it can occasion

inconvenience to any participator in a business which they themselves enjoy. So the poor innocent sea-monsters floundered in slimy agony upon the deck; the boar hound and the cats taking a share in martyring them, tearing and biting at them as they gasped their lives away; condemned to agony for some strange reason, or perhaps because, as every living thing is born to suffer, they were enduring but their fair proportion, as they happened to be fish. Pathetic and unwept the tragedy of all the animals, and we, but links in the same chain with them, look at it all as unconcerned as gods."

This is well pleaded, but when we take away the bright rhetoric, strain out the separable accidents, the captain's want of interest, the cats and boar hound, and the innocence of those same sea-monsters (whose very bellies were no doubt filled with half digested smaller sea beasts) what have we left? A man filled his time and fed his cats, by sacrificing fish, whereas we others feed our cats upon the entrails of sweet breathed kine or sacrifice our cats by not feeding them and by letting them catch robins in the shrubbery. He might have knocked his

sea monsters on the head, or else have kept away the boar hound, who, we must admit, probably inflicted unnecessary pain, but the cats would almost certainly numb their victims immediately by gripping their spines. Could the captain be both uninterested and also enjoy? So, to get a reasonable judgment, even upon honest principles, we must take account of the pleasure of a man, the satisfaction and food of the animals, and we must also be careful not to overstate the pain caused to the fish by calling their short passage "slimy agony" and so on. But all hedonist reasoning is null and void by the fact that we have no unit of joy, nothing answering to the foot pound, or the degree of heat. We who love angling neither hotly nor coldly deny that it causes more pain than it cures, and we know that life and death are not the masters but the subjects of Man. Mr. Graham, even you would not be quite so hard upon the land monsters if you angled

a bit more for the sea ones.

Consider this, at any rate, as a pis aller. It is a better tonic than mere raillery.

THE OPTIMIST.

"When your best foot first and your weightiest blow, Gain nothing but echoes of 'fool, fool, fool!'

Why don't turn sour, man, but hurry and go :
Do the perches feed in the Hurtle pool?

Does Euphemia pout in a shrewish way?

Is your money run out in the middle of winter? Well, the gudgeons still strike in the Tumbling Bay, And there's still that Jack in the hole called Grinter. From Twindicks up to the Bathing deeps,

Especially near those hawthorn bushes, The large old roach still trysting keeps,

And the water is rippled with trout-like rushes. Does rain attend on the world political

Just try the Alder or Wragg to the Hatches: The Church? let her toss in her fevers critical With a lob or gentles, still one catches.

In mood poetic, do you try forlorny

To sing some lilt in the strain of Sidney? O publish it first to the Chubs at Thorny Or consult the oracle dace at Midney.

Is your liver wrong, be hanged to podophyllin ! Monk's hole's your physic, eels bask at the big pool : Fish fellow! go fishing, and flee philosophilling,

Those waters are curative where swims the big school.

O Aquinas, Hegel and Thomas Hill Green, and ye
O Biblicocritic apotomic moilers,

The miller at Gawbridge is dearer by far to me,
So is his amiable brother at Joyler's.

Bishops? or babies? what worry is 't fast your in?

Friend! I've some minnows; and O such a fly! You know the place where the big ones are pasturing, Don't tell to everyone just where they lie.

CHAPTER II-Forefathers.

T

mean

HE glorious company of anglers contains names of no value, and of no slight antiquity. Passing by the reverend apostles, (whose fishing was hardly to be classed with that of sportsmen, Father Isaac notwithstanding), yet the Bible is fuller of allusions to the gentle craft than the vulgar will allow. For instance, there are three Hebrew terms for a fish-hook-the palate hook, the sharp hook, and the thorn hook. People who thus refined could not have belonged to the laity. The Philistines, we know, carried their ichthyolatry beyond all bounds by adoring Dagon, and thus making the fish the master of the man; but their very exaggerations prove that the chosen people had ardent feelings in the right direction. We know that it was necessary to forbid the Jews from worshipping the ideal polypounder. Solomon studied fishes. Amos and Habakkuk thought it not amiss to depict Jehovah Himself equipped as an an