There is something quite pathetic in the story of the
enor- mous trout, weighing over a stone, and measuring nearly three feet in length, which was caught last week in the River Itchen near Winchester. The poor beast had haunted the stream for years, and was as well known to the inhabitants of Winchester " as Queen Anne's statue in the High Street." He had acquired, besides, a reputation far and wide for the number of rods he had broken and fishing-tackle he had demolished. As he lay in state on the slab of the local fishmonger, to whom he was sold for £1, he attracted, we are told, as many visitors as a monarch laid out for burial. Perhaps the saddest part of the whole thing is that he is to be stuffed and put in a glass case, where, with his tinsel water and bits of pea-green paper grass, he will look simply hideous. If the object of catching him was to make him a show, why was he not left alone in the waters of the Itchen, where he was a really beautiful sight, and where he evidently made himself by no means inaccessible to those who came to pay their respects P Every now and then an angler might have been aUowed to break a line with him in a kind of water tournament, but it was monstrous to go beyond this. We do not envy the feelings of the man who could basely catch an old acquaintance.
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