PIKE-FISHING.

ENGRAVED BY H. BECKWITH, FROM A PAINTING BY J. POLLARD.

WITH A FEW OBSERVATIONS ON IT, BY AN EPICURE.

An epicure, like an exquisite, is perhaps not a title that one would very readily own to; still a man may be an epicure in sport as well as palate; and so, with a double duty for the term, I'll consent to serve under it.

In the early days of our history the Government made laws and offered rewards for the destruction of wolves, with which the island was awfully infested, and so the people used to occupy themselves in the pursuit, less as a pastime than as a business every death being an individual advantage to the hunter and a common good to the country.

Fishing laws or fishery acts never gained much popularity yet for the framers of them, or I might be induced to draw up another. I would treat the pike in the water as our ancestors did the wolf on the land-get rid of him by every available means known. In his nature this fish is eminently disgusting; and as for the sport--the trolling-it is hard labour very questionably disguised. Fancy the throw after throw of the dull, heavy bait, with such a finish too! and the play you might have had for half the exertion, and twice the excitement, with a noble salmon or a dainty trout!

And yet in this enlightened age you hear people say they cannot keep trout in a stream, because of the pike. Not that the brutes, perhaps, especially affect that most gentlemanly of the finny tribe, but simply because they happen to come in their way; just as the cannibals eat one another, or like the fresh-water shark they have been so fitly denominated, bolt water-rats, drowned puppies, bits of boat chain, old boots, or anything else they can possibly encompass with their infernal jaws. Still the pike is fine eating, too, when roasted, or baked, or boiled, with, as Falstaff says, " a pudding in his belly"-with a fine racy flavour like a well-dressed deal board, and sent round in great coarse heaps that none but a keeper could face, and he'd swop it for bacon any day. I can imagine few things more trying than being placed opposite one of the over-gorged monsters, and pressing delicate Miss De Courcy to partake of it, because you "caught" it yourself. I'd rather own to catching a badger, or a runaway boy from the Tooting Academy.

Few works on angling ever reach the entertaining. To be sure, there is something, independent of his subject, amusing enough in the Quaker-like philosophy and quiet conceit of Izaak Walton, that becomes all the more valuable the longer it is after date. The Captain Medwin or Mr. Maxwell school of writer again, with their flashy style, are pleasant reading, especially when they whip clean off the kind of game they began to draw for. Take the run of the authorities, however, and without you are outrageously enthusiastic it

is hard work. There is a wax-end smell pervades page after page that is not enticing, and a continued reference to shops and shopmen that half inclines one to believe that, though born a sportsman, you should be bred a mechanic to be perfect in the so-termed " gentle art." Without it is something more than usually urgent I never look at them. It is about as engrossing a pastime as reading Johnson's Dictionary, column for column, without having any particular word to find; or Pattison's Roads, without having any particular one to go; or Burke's Peerage, without having a lord to dine with, or Weatherby's Calendar, without a horse to run. Besides, I don't think a man can be taught the thing efficiently in this way; and so, if there should be a professor within range, I generally go to him.

Of course, after saying how little I study them, it naturally follows that I am going to quote a work on Angling-by the O'Gorman, a gentleman who wrote a couple of volumes two or three years since, in which he seemed to consider that there was no kind of fishing but one, and that one was salmon-fishing. I shall not attempt to dispute this, no more than I should the main matter of his solitary chapter on the pike. It opens well—

"As I consider it perfectly meritorious to destroy these fierce and destructive animals in every practicable way except by nets, I purpose giving the result of my experience, though I cannot say it is a kind of fishing I like."

Exactly. It is proposed by the Epicurean, and seconded by the O'Gorman, that the pike should be destroyed in every practicable way, and that it is not a kind of fishing a man can care about. ried unanimously.

Again says our friend

Car

"The small trout, the salmon-fry, a small herring, the tail of an eel spangled and tinselled, are excellent" [bait, as well as the frog]; "so is a small-sized jack, and sometimes a good-sized one; so is a goldfinch, a swallow, or a yellow. hammer."

And so on with the "so is" ad infinitum. No doubt, if a man was to put on a horse's head, or a sheep's paunch, he would kill some extraordinary beast or another, that the local paper would bray about, and a set of semi-barbarians wash down with whiskey-and-water. It is enough to make one ill to think of it.

Another word from the O'Gorman, and I have done

"The best time for catching these rapacious devils is the morning; and if hazy, with little wind, so much the better. I mean on the lakes: for pike-fising a river without a boat is slavish and disagreeable work."

Certainly, sir-carried again nem. con. The Epicurean says it is "hard labour"-the O'Gorman calls it "slavish work." I leave every man to take his choice, as I shouldn't wish to split hairs about such a truism.

When the Irishman was selling his horse, he allowed he had two little failings; and when he had sold him he explained what they were. In the first place, if ever he got away it was the most terrible job to catch him; and secondly, that if you did he really wasn't worth the trouble. With the editor's permission, I would recommend his pike-fishing subject on the same terms.