May 22.
Somzone has dropped on the editor's table a copy of the "Fishing Gazette."" It is long since he set eyes on that familiar cover—white nowadays instead of green and smaller than of yore; these being war time restrictions, one supposes; but still wearing that beautiful vignette, with the portrait of Sir Izaak Walton and the scenes of sea and river fishing: and the sight of it awakens hallowed memories and inspires a thrill which must find expression on paper. Whence it comes and why we have no idea. At first one thought, but wrongly, that it might contain some further allusion to Huang Chuan Vu, of which, it will be remembered, a specimen recently exposed itself to brutal murder by garden coolies in Hongkew lake. But if there is nothing about China fish in the Gazette, there are plenty of other things to stir an angler's enthusiasm: a forty pound Severn salmon—''a typical very large spring fish, two years in the river and four years in the sea without spawning''; another of fifty-two pounds from the Wye, ''where there is a big run of fish'? (just think of it) and a curious story, from Blackwater foot in the Island of Arran, of trout eating trout, which, the Editor comments, they will do when they can. Perhaps they may in Arran and of course a kelt is for a time as bad in a river as a pike. But speaking from rather far-off memories, we fancy our Hampshire trout were better behaved.
There is no name in the world so aptly invented as was "the gentle art'' to describe fishing. The associations which the words conjure up for the present writer are almost wholly
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.