<h2>CHAPTER XVII.</h2>
<p class="gutsumm">Washing day.—Fish and fishers.—On
the art of angling.—A conscientious fly-fisher.—A
fishy story.</p>
<p><SPAN href="images/p273b.jpg">
<ANTIMG class='floatright' alt= "Washing line" title= "Washing line" src="images/p273s.jpg" /></SPAN>We stayed two days at Streatley, and got our clothes
washed. We had tried washing them ourselves, in the river,
under George’s superintendence, and it had been a
failure. Indeed, it had been more than a failure, because
we were worse off after we had washed our clothes than we were
before. Before we had washed them, they had been very, very
dirty, it is true; but they were just wearable.
<i>After</i> we had washed them—well, the river between
Reading and Henley was much cleaner, after we had washed our
clothes in it, than it was before. All the dirt contained
in the river between Reading and Henley, we collected, during
that wash, and worked it into our clothes.</p>
<p>The washerwoman at Streatley said she felt she owed it to
herself to charge us just three times the usual prices for that
wash. She said it had not been like washing, it had been
more in the nature of excavating.</p>
<p>We paid the bill without a murmur.</p>
<p>The neighbourhood of Streatley and Goring is a great fishing
centre. There is some excellent fishing to be had
here. The river abounds in pike, roach, dace, gudgeon, and
eels, just here; and you can sit and fish for them all day.</p>
<p>Some people do. They never catch them. I never
knew anybody catch anything, up the Thames, except minnows and
dead cats, but that has nothing to do, of course, with
fishing! The local fisherman’s guide doesn’t
say a word about catching anything. All it says is the
place is “a good station for fishing;” and, from what
I have seen of the district, I am quite prepared to bear out this
statement.</p>
<p>There is no spot in the world where you can get more fishing,
or where you can fish for a longer period. Some fishermen
come here and fish for a day, and others stop and fish for a
month. You can hang on and fish for a year, if you want to:
it will be all the same.</p>
<p>The <i>Angler’s Guide to the Thames</i> says that
“jack and perch are also to be had about here,” but
there the <i>Angler’s Guide</i> is wrong. Jack and
perch may <i>be</i> about there. Indeed, I know for a fact
that they are. You can <i>see</i> them there in shoals,
when you are out for a walk along the banks: they come and stand
half out of the water with their mouths open for biscuits.
And, if you go for a bathe, they crowd round, and get in your
way, and irritate you. But they are not to be
“had” by a bit of worm on the end of a hook, nor
anything like it—not they!</p>
<p>I am not a good fisherman myself. I devoted a
considerable amount of attention to the subject at one time, and
was getting on, as I thought, fairly well; but the old hands told
me that I should never be any real good at it, and advised me to
give it up. They said that I was an extremely neat thrower,
and that I seemed to have plenty of gumption for the thing, and
quite enough constitutional laziness. But they were sure I
should never make anything of a fisherman. I had not got
sufficient imagination.</p>
<p>They said that as a poet, or a shilling shocker, or a
reporter, or anything of that kind, I might be satisfactory, but
that, to gain any position as a Thames angler, would require more
play of fancy, more power of invention than I appeared to
possess.</p>
<p>Some people are under the impression that all that is required
to make a good fisherman is the ability to tell lies easily and
without blushing; but this is a mistake. Mere bald
fabrication is useless; the veriest tyro can manage that.
It is in the circumstantial detail, the embellishing touches of
probability, the general air of scrupulous—almost of
pedantic—veracity, that the experienced angler is seen.</p>
<p>Anybody can come in and say, “Oh, I caught fifteen dozen
perch yesterday evening;” or “Last Monday I landed a
gudgeon, weighing eighteen pounds, and measuring three feet from
the tip to the tail.”</p>
<p>There is no art, no skill, required for that sort of
thing. It shows pluck, but that is all.</p>
<p>No; your accomplished angler would scorn to tell a lie, that
way. His method is a study in itself.</p>
<p>He comes in quietly with his hat on, appropriates the most
comfortable chair, lights his pipe, and commences to puff in
silence. He lets the youngsters brag away for a while, and
then, during a momentary lull, he removes the pipe from his
mouth, and remarks, as he knocks the ashes out against the
bars:</p>
<p>“Well, I had a haul on Tuesday evening that it’s
not much good my telling anybody about.”</p>
<p>“Oh! why’s that?” they ask.</p>
<p>“Because I don’t expect anybody would believe me
if I did,” replies the old fellow calmly, and without even
a tinge of bitterness in his tone, as he refills his pipe, and
requests the landlord to bring him three of Scotch, cold.</p>
<p>There is a pause after this, nobody feeling sufficiently sure
of himself to contradict the old gentleman. So he has to go
on by himself without any encouragement.</p>
<p>“No,” he continues thoughtfully; “I
shouldn’t believe it myself if anybody told it to me, but
it’s a fact, for all that. I had been sitting there
all the afternoon and had caught literally nothing—except a
few dozen dace and a score of jack; and I was just about giving
it up as a bad job when I suddenly felt a rather smart pull at
the line. I thought it was another little one, and I went
to jerk it up. Hang me, if I could move the rod! It
took me half-an-hour—half-an-hour, sir!—to land that
fish; and every moment I thought the line was going to
snap! I reached him at last, and what do you think it
was? A sturgeon! a forty pound sturgeon! taken on a line,
sir! Yes, you may well look surprised—I’ll have
another three of Scotch, landlord, please.”</p>
<p>And then he goes on to tell of the astonishment of everybody
who saw it; and what his wife said, when he got home, and of what
Joe Buggles thought about it.</p>
<p>I asked the landlord of an inn up the river once, if it did
not injure him, sometimes, listening to the tales that the
fishermen about there told him; and he said:</p>
<p>“Oh, no; not now, sir. It did used to knock me
over a bit at first, but, lor love you! me and the missus we
listens to ’em all day now. It’s what
you’re used to, you know. It’s what
you’re used to.”</p>
<p>I knew a young man once, he was a most conscientious fellow,
and, when he took to fly-fishing, he determined never to
exaggerate his hauls by more than twenty-five per cent.</p>
<p>“When I have caught forty fish,” said he,
“then I will tell people that I have caught fifty, and so
on. But I will not lie any more than that, because it is
sinful to lie.”</p>
<p>But the twenty-five per cent. plan did not work well at
all. He never was able to use it. The greatest number
of fish he ever caught in one day was three, and you can’t
add twenty-five per cent. to three—at least, not in
fish.</p>
<p>So he increased his percentage to thirty-three-and-a-third;
but that, again, was awkward, when he had only caught one or two;
so, to simplify matters, he made up his mind to just double the
quantity.</p>
<p>He stuck to this arrangement for a couple of months, and then
he grew dissatisfied with it. Nobody believed him when he
told them that he only doubled, and he, therefore, gained no
credit that way whatever, while his moderation put him at a
disadvantage among the other anglers. When he had really
caught three small fish, and said he had caught six, it used to
make him quite jealous to hear a man, whom he knew for a fact had
only caught one, going about telling people he had landed two
dozen.</p>
<p>So, eventually, he made one final arrangement with himself,
which he has religiously held to ever since, and that was to
count each fish that he caught as ten, and to assume ten to begin
with. For example, if he did not catch any fish at all,
then he said he had caught ten fish—you could never catch
less than ten fish by his system; that was the foundation of
it. Then, if by any chance he really did catch one fish, he
called it twenty, while two fish would count thirty, three forty,
and so on.</p>
<p>It is a simple and easily worked plan, and there has been some
talk lately of its being made use of by the angling fraternity in
general. Indeed, the Committee of the Thames Angler’s
Association did recommend its adoption about two years ago, but
some of the older members opposed it. They said they would
consider the idea if the number were doubled, and each fish
counted as twenty.</p>
<p>If ever you have an evening to spare, up the river, I should
advise you to drop into one of the little village inns, and take
a seat in the tap-room. You will be nearly sure to meet one
or two old rod-men, sipping their toddy there, and they will tell
you enough fishy stories, in half an hour, to give you
indigestion for a month.</p>
<p>George and I—I don’t know what had become of
Harris; he had gone out and had a shave, early in the afternoon,
and had then come back and spent full forty minutes in
pipeclaying his shoes, we had not seen him since—George and
I, therefore, and the dog, left to ourselves, went for a walk to
Wallingford on the second evening, and, coming home, we called in
at a little river-side inn, for a rest, and other things.</p>
<p>We went into the parlour and sat down. There was an old
fellow there, smoking a long clay pipe, and we naturally began
chatting.</p>
<p>He told us that it had been a fine day to-day, and we told him
that it had been a fine day yesterday, and then we all told each
other that we thought it would be a fine day to-morrow; and
George said the crops seemed to be coming up nicely.</p>
<p>After that it came out, somehow or other, that we were
strangers in the neighbourhood, and that we were going away the
next morning.</p>
<p><SPAN href="images/p281b.jpg">
<ANTIMG class='floatright' alt= "The trout" title= "The trout" src="images/p281s.jpg" /></SPAN>Then a pause ensued in the conversation, during which our
eyes wandered round the room. They finally rested upon a
dusty old glass-case, fixed very high up above the chimney-piece,
and containing a trout. It rather fascinated me, that
trout; it was such a monstrous fish. In fact, at first
glance, I thought it was a cod.</p>
<p>“Ah!” said the old gentleman, following the
direction of my gaze, “fine fellow that, ain’t
he?”</p>
<p>“Quite uncommon,” I murmured; and George asked the
old man how much he thought it weighed.</p>
<p>“Eighteen pounds six ounces,” said our friend,
rising and taking down his coat. “Yes,” he
continued, “it wur sixteen year ago, come the third
o’ next month, that I landed him. I caught him just
below the bridge with a minnow. They told me he wur in the
river, and I said I’d have him, and so I did. You
don’t see many fish that size about here now, I’m
thinking. Good-night, gentlemen, good-night.”</p>
<p>And out he went, and left us alone.</p>
<p>We could not take our eyes off the fish after that. It
really was a remarkably fine fish. We were still looking at
it, when the local carrier, who had just stopped at the inn, came
to the door of the room with a pot of beer in his hand, and he
also looked at the fish.</p>
<p>“Good-sized trout, that,” said George, turning
round to him.</p>
<p>“Ah! you may well say that, sir,” replied the man;
and then, after a pull at his beer, he added, “Maybe you
wasn’t here, sir, when that fish was caught?”</p>
<p>“No,” we told him. We were strangers in the
neighbourhood.</p>
<p>“Ah!” said the carrier, “then, of course,
how should you? It was nearly five years ago that I caught
that trout.”</p>
<p>“Oh! was it you who caught it, then?” said I.</p>
<p>“Yes, sir,” replied the genial old fellow.
“I caught him just below the lock—leastways, what was
the lock then—one Friday afternoon; and the remarkable
thing about it is that I caught him with a fly. I’d
gone out pike fishing, bless you, never thinking of a trout, and
when I saw that whopper on the end of my line, blest if it
didn’t quite take me aback. Well, you see, he weighed
twenty-six pound. Good-night, gentlemen,
good-night.”</p>
<p>Five minutes afterwards, a third man came in, and described
how <i>he</i> had caught it early one morning, with bleak; and
then he left, and a stolid, solemn-looking, middle-aged
individual came in, and sat down over by the window.</p>
<p>None of us spoke for a while; but, at length, George turned to
the new comer, and said:</p>
<p>“I beg your pardon, I hope you will forgive the liberty
that we—perfect strangers in the neighbourhood—are
taking, but my friend here and myself would be so much obliged if
you would tell us how you caught that trout up there.”</p>
<p>“Why, who told you I caught that trout!” was the
surprised query.</p>
<p>We said that nobody had told us so, but somehow or other we
felt instinctively that it was he who had done it.</p>
<p>“Well, it’s a most remarkable thing—most
remarkable,” answered the stolid stranger, laughing;
“because, as a matter of fact, you are quite right. I
did catch it. But fancy your guessing it like that.
Dear me, it’s really a most remarkable thing.”</p>
<p>And then he went on, and told us how it had taken him half an
hour to land it, and how it had broken his rod. He said he
had weighed it carefully when he reached home, and it had turned
the scale at thirty-four pounds.</p>
<p>He went in his turn, and when he was gone, the landlord came
in to us. We told him the various histories we had heard
about his trout, and he was immensely amused, and we all laughed
very heartily.</p>
<p>“Fancy Jim Bates and Joe Muggles and Mr. Jones and old
Billy Maunders all telling you that they had caught it. Ha!
ha! ha! Well, that is good,” said the honest old
fellow, laughing heartily. “Yes, they are the sort to
give it <i>me</i>, to put up in <i>my</i> parlour, if <i>they</i>
had caught it, they are! Ha! ha! ha!”</p>
<p>And then he told us the real history of the fish. It
seemed that he had caught it himself, years ago, when he was
quite a lad; not by any art or skill, but by that unaccountable
luck that appears to always wait upon a boy when he plays the wag
from school, and goes out fishing on a sunny afternoon, with a
bit of string tied on to the end of a tree.</p>
<p>He said that bringing home that trout had saved him from a
whacking, and that even his school-master had said it was worth
the rule-of-three and practice put together.</p>
<p>He was called out of the room at this point, and George and I
again turned our gaze upon the fish.</p>
<p>It really was a most astonishing trout. The more we
looked at it, the more we marvelled at it.</p>
<p>It excited George so much that he climbed up on the back of a
chair to get a better view of it.</p>
<p>And then the chair slipped, and George clutched wildly at the
trout-case to save himself, and down it came with a crash, George
and the chair on top of it.</p>
<p>“You haven’t injured the fish, have you?” I
cried in alarm, rushing up.</p>
<p>“I hope not,” said George, rising cautiously and
looking about.</p>
<p>But he had. That trout lay shattered into a thousand
fragments—I say a thousand, but they may have only been
nine hundred. I did not count them.</p>
<p>We thought it strange and unaccountable that a stuffed trout
should break up into little pieces like that.</p>
<p>And so it would have been strange and unaccountable, if it had
been a stuffed trout, but it was not.</p>
<p>That trout was plaster-of-Paris.</p>
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