TROUT FISHING.*
THERE is a certain type of sporting book—the subject, perhaps, is oftener shooting than fishing—which the reader lays down with irritation more than with envy. Its author is too successful on the grand scale. " What is the use of this man describing these magnificent days ? " we ask. " They are not for us : we can never share in them." Mr. Sheringham is not this kind of writer. He makes friends of us at once because he does not despise the day of small things. We need only read a page or two to discover (if his previous books had not already assured us) that he is a first-rate fisherman, with a good deal more than average success to show for his skill. But he is attracted, he persuades us, almost more by the small day and the little stream than by the big. He begins with a delightful chapter which treats of " Early Days," eels in a Holy Well, eels in Gloucestershire ditches, and trout in a brook near the Severn Sea, taken from " a sort of secret drawer at the back of the foam." He goes on with " Tiny Waters "—such streams as you may climb in with a seven-foot rod to take quarter-pounders under bushes. He does not care, he tells us, for days in which mere numbers of trout make the bag ; and perhaps the best chapter in the book describes a little chalk stream, the Meon, which has a special claim to the attention of the historian in that by ifs banks Izaak Walton must have passed many days during the last years of his life.
But if Mr. Sheringham takes us as his companion the more willingly to the little brooks, partly because they lend themselves better than the big to a writer of sound English and a humorous good nature, he has assuredly himself travelled with profit by wider waters. He has taken a trout weighing two ounces short of eight pounds from the Coke. On his first day at Blagdon he landed a trout of 61 lbs. He has had great days on the Itchen, the Test, and the Kennet ; and of other days less successful he writes that he " can point proudly to considerable losses." All these have taught him much, and, indeed, he justifies his title with singular completeness. Of dry fly and wet fly, of minnow and worm, mayfly, weather, wind and a hundred fisherman's wrinkles he writes with the full ease of long experi- ence. He has also a nimble wit. " Ara longa trutta brevia," e.g., we learn is a proverb which means " the longer you take to cover a fish the shorter he rises." In one small particular, however, a crowded memory fails him. It is a pleasant reminder of human fallibility to discover a recognized authority on angling literature, such as is Mr. Sheringham, attributing to Sir Walter Scott the well-known lines, " No fisher But a well-wisher To the game." Scott edited Richard Franck's Northern Memoirs
.• Trout Fishing : Memories and Morale. By H. T. Sheringham. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1125. Od. net.]
in which the lines appear in a dedicatory pcem ; but did not the author sign himself John Richards ?
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