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TIDDLERS.
Not only boys will delight in the suggestion that the London ponds should be restocked with " tiddlers." Not long ago I was calling on the owner of a country estate, who told me that he was restocking his ditches. The very afternoon of my call he was expecting the arrival of " three thousand stickle- backs " I do not know to what shop one would send an order for 3,000 sticklebacks ; but it would not take long to catch them in certain favourable places. In my garden I have a small pond, connected with a brook by some fifteen yards of underground piping. Sticklebacks—of the three- spined variety—swarm down the pipe and appear in the pond where they are apt to die unless rescued and returned to the brook. The kindly M.P., Captain Ian Fraser, may assure his Majesty's Government that there would be no practical difficulty at all in carrying out his suggestion for restocking London waters. By the way, fishing for trout opened on many of our best streams on Bank holiday. It would be well if some of them (from which the trout have mysteriously vanished—as on the upper Lea) should be restocked at the same time as the London ponds. Tiddler and trout-fishers belong to the same fraternity.
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