Fishing Story Presumably if a man saw an advertisement for
a " polished dural screwed tapered butt cap; holders and collar, bored corks, porcelain butt and tip rings, rubber button, cement and whipping silk " he would at once know he was being given the opportunity to make his own fishing rod. A woman, or at any rate an Englishwoman, would come to no such conclusion for, unlike her Continental sisters, she seems to have no piscatorial ambitions. True, the Queen and the Queen Mother are keen salnion fishers, and other ladies can often be seen casting a fly as they stand, waist high on greasy cannon-balls in Scottish waters, but it is rare here to meet a woman dabbling a worm-baited line in a, pond; one eye on the float and the other on her knitting. At Lac d'Annecy, whence I have recently returned, fisherwomen abound. Of every age and size they fish all day, some of them in- congruously dressed for a Presidential garden party, and if they never catch more than half a dozen sprat-sized fish yet the rising moon finds them still at it. It must be supposed these trophies of the chase are eaten in a friture and that it is the Frenchwoman's innate thriftiness which binds her so long to her camp stool, a thriftiness not shared by the English housekeeper, an artist at culinary waste. All the same, in contrast to the cloth-capped sportsman of our river banks the French lady, however commendable her motives, looks, strangely enough, faintly improper.
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