is to be found within his radius. Your unworldly angler laughs at such unsatiated lustings. Not that he disdains the large and lordly, if it comes his way; but because to him the idea is larger and more lordly even than the rushing, leaping king of fishes, and so if salmon are not to be had, he will be content with trout. If these are out of reach, are there not other fishes, nibbling roach, or little minnows?-creatures not to be despised because they are tiny, and, as we shall shew hereafter, not despised by our wiser fathers, and not now despised by those who know that even the best fishing is like the worst, a little vanity, a harmless vanity, an innocent vanity but still all the same, vanity and nothingness, a prison pastime, which we may play at till our execution time arrives, and we leave our little cell for ever. So too, though we strive for success, because it is part of the pure idea, we are content with a light basket, and envy not the absurd creature who refuses to count his spoil save by the stone; and we despise not our poor and thwarted brother, who has only the luck of Simple Simon, and is glad to fill his basket with mushrooms, or water-lilies, so that he shall, at all events, have some memento of

his gentle day. Is the angler a country lord or a soap-boiler bubbling over with expensive tools and tackle? Is he a school-boy, splashing in his penny float, or a thick-shod urchin with a cork and pea-stick? Is he a ripe scholar, cooling his brain, or a truant evading the Education Acts? He may be equally a lover of wisdom in his Art, equally single-eyed, equally above the supreme vanity of despising or envying any one concrete embodiment of the idea, or of confusing success with skill. Dear Platonic brother of the Craft, in whatever guise thou comest, I see thee as a blessed Spirit by the pure river of Life, or near the crystal Lake, wandering in the pied meads of sunny Paradise, or under the healing twelve-fruited trees, thy cheerful face sunny with God, and thy creel blest as with the plus, or the minus, of the miraculous manna. Thou, too, wilt sup with the Lamb, on a broiled fish, and an honeycomb, shall it be? But here comes in a caveat. My worthy spinster aunt, a most venomously respectable person, who has spent her life plying the angle in matrimonial waters (without catch), and is now actively engaged in pouring lime, curari, and dynamite into the river of life,

objects that all field sports are cruel, and that angling is peculiarly barbaric; for whereas men are made to be taken, if possible, or, at any rate, to be destroyed, fishes and worms are hedged about with some precepts of Divine Love, and upon every scale and ring is written Noli me tangere and written by Religion herself, for Aunt Susan has read and deciphered the same; and she is a most pertinacious missionary. She scares our angler friends, rather shy biters anyhow, from our frugal table, by asking them how they would like to be lifted on to mountains by meat-hooks stuck through their palates? How they would relish being drowned and impaled at one fetch? How they would regard some macrocosmic man, whose delight was to butcher anglers with batons and consume their sanguined flesh with melted butter? It is true that my worthy aunt does not disdain a fine dish of fishes, especially on Fridays, for she is a devout Churchwoman, but they must be caught by persons unknown, and by methods equally unknown to her. I have seen her, poising a fragment of pork flesh upon her fork, whose mute fibres cried like a brother's blood against her, wax almost prophetic in

her humane inconsistency. Poor lady! Perhaps she is rather too easy an opponent to afford much sport in the catching-though she is undeniably game. I have, spiritually speaking, gaffed her many times, by showing her that her arguments come round like boomerangs, come round and smite the very hand that throws them. Granted that we anglers cause death and pain, and find our very health, pleasure, and even life, in things shotted with these heavy weights, what then? Let him, or her, that is without reproach in these matters, by all means stone us. Aunt Susan does not disdain to ply her fork upon roast lamb: but even if I converted her to a vegetable diet, she would be no nearer to her goal of a life unsustained by sacrifice. She would be constantly robbing the worm and the weevil of their whole larder nay, for every draught of water that she took, she would still be butchering whole families and tribes of innocent aquatic creatures-to whom life is dear and delightful. She could not tread upon the lawny carpets of the earth or ply the broom upon her own Brussels without slaying quick and trembling organisms. Indeed it is improbable that she could even raise that

bony hortatory finger of hers without the death of certain living members of her populated blood and swarming tissues. This is not a mere Tu quoque. It is an introduction to the sounder and saner view of life, which ordinary men act upon without even troubling to formulate it, that we are meant to receive sacrifices, as well as to make them, and that our every action and motion is shadowed by death and pain. "O horrible, and malevolent conclusion says mine aunt when I broach it, "the very climax of atheism! I cannot and will not believe that we are nourished upon slaughter. Give me Coleridge and his 'prayeth best, who loveth best, all things both great and small.' That is more to my taste than this Gospel of Blood and Barbarism." As my aunt said this, she bit her piece of ripe Stilton rather fiercely, and said nothing until dessert, when she cracked a Brazil nut, which proved to. be bad. A solemn stillness reigned and we could hear the clock tick, an electric tick which betokened stormy weather. I was agreeably surprised by finding the argument taken up by my gentle cousin Hilda, the sweetest, most delicate and most sportive of all the ladies of our people. "Why aunt," she