times you are on the track of a green drake or a winged ant. Hat and hand at last bring him to book, but you have flattened him, when you get him. A silvery moth at last rewards you, and you float him out. Dab, snap, ripple, and the dace has robbed you of the fruit of twenty minutes athletic exercise. Happy, then, is the man who has a store of blue-bottles by him. He seats himself behind a tussock or a tree and floats his dainty upon the tide with a yard or two of fine gut and a tiny hook. The dace are delighted. So is the angler. His empty kettle sings, as the little fellows chase one another round it, and soon the paternoster descends with a couple of them just where the old sentinel is likely to observe them. Do not splash if you can help it, but leave the pike unscared and the bait just near a corner. Reeds, water lilies, a back reach, a fine submarine jungle, a little drift weed and a highway for little fishes, these are what the pike look out for. The dace is an intelligent fish. If pike are near he will do his best to move your line and lead, but he is not fond of hiding. A frightened perchlet tangles himself in weeds, but a dace tries first to bolt along the open country. He is the hare of the river, not given to burrowing, but built for swiftness. Look at his fair proportions, his finely tapering form. That blaze of silver which shines out on the grass, when looked at from below against a clear sky must be very hard to see at all, when the water laps and furrows and curves over the stones. When he sinks, his darker back needs an heron eye to distinguish him from the green wrack and amber pebbles. He is audacious but yet quick to seek safety in flight, and his flight is sustained. His amazing impudence and invulnerable merriment must make him a great trial to the temper of his pikish enemy, and therefore when he is to be had at a disadvantage authority has to be reasserted. Imagine a powerful bishop. He has been stung by some smart young writer. He has been made ridiculous by the paragraphs of that irresponsible wit. Even the prebendaries and canons-in-residence have smirked and sub-chuckled at the amusing sentences. Dignitaries detest ridicule worse than refutation. All of a sudden the smart offender is upon his knees. He is among the crowd of meek and obsequious candidates for Orders, or for Licences, or suing for tit-bits from the episcopal side dishes. Can any human bishop be so far above the revenges of the world, as not to fall upon the luckless little wag? Will he not plough, inhibit, deny, chasten or expose him now? The wretch falters upon the Kenosis. He has scamped Butler. He would make havoc of the cure. He is a flippant and an unevangelical heresiarch. Business, pleasure, duty, and delight, determine the heavy prelate. He is hot foot for massacre and his momentum (weight multiplied by velocity) is awful to behold. Such is the Right Reverend the Pike, when he sees your dace within his reach. He may have fed to repletion already, but insolence must be chastised and he mouths the helpless flouter with undisguised satisfaction. Sir John Falstaff is quite right "a young dace is the bait for an old pike," and none other for choice. Let him be young too. Indeed Indeed your catch is almost in inverse proportion to your bait. A half-pound dace may get you only a pound Jack, and vice versa. The dace is a very game fish. He fights as fiercely as if he were at least a trout. He will break, whatever his weight can break, and he has nothing invalidish, melancholy or despairing about him. Even when he is but an inch long, he has a quick eye and a wellbalanced athletic poise. What happens to him, when he gets old? Can he get old? He is surely a Greek. Wordsworth tells us that the old age of the blackbird is "beautiful and free." An aged blackbird sprinkled with grey round his poll, hoarse and iterative in note, his tawny orange bill faded into a withered yellow can be imagined. But an aged dace, all head and leanness, no man can imagine. These children of the sun have no tenacious hold upon life. Their silver suits cannot be tarnished and oxydized, for they would lay them by first, I imagine. Yet dace will live in captivity for long, but you must keep the water fresh and sweet. A pond will not do for them unless there is a current through it. They avoid scum. Rotten weeds make them sickly, at least they will not live, when caught in that septic time. Dace can be tamed a little, and will rise to welcome the hand which offers the ant's egg or crumb, but such close familiarity with the little water poet is disturbing to the mind. It prevents one from saying with the old William Lauson in his Comments on the Secrets of Angling (1653): "Pray to God with your heart to bless your lawful exercise," for one cannot know the dace too intimately, and be his friend and admirer, and yet deliver him-the poet-the child of light, into the jaws of the Philistine pike. Not that he is a merciful fish. He lives by bold rapine and the whole destruction of delicate gauzy things, each of which in his turn, no doubt, takes his span of life with zest. It is perhaps unreasonable to pity him too deeply and inharmoniously. But yet pain and death, which seem native and proper for solemn coxcombs, for your insolent, gaudy, spruce perches, who bayonet their way through the river thoroughfares, appear inapposite for the gay, dancing, humorist dace. His life is a comedy and too frivolous for tragedies. It is an airy, tiptoe, flibberty-gibbet existence. But nature has not exempted him from the common lot. His suit of silver crumples, as easily as if he were a groping, smoky tench, or a sooty loach. We must use him, as we are ourselves used. Perhaps the larger love is more justified by use than by our partial knowledge and squeamish sentimentality. Some people will, if they find a worm on the path move it away. Others tread upon |