These are, surely, in their imperfect and perfect states, food enough
to fatten many a good trout: but they are not all. See these
transparent brown snails, Limneae and Succinae, climbing about the
posts; and these other pretty ones, coil laid within coil as flat as
a shilling, Planorbis. Many a million of these do the trout pick off
the weed day by day; and no food, not even the leech, which swarms
here, is more fattening. The finest trout of the high Snowdon lakes
feed almost entirely on leech and snail--baits they have none--and
fatten till they cut as red as a salmon.

Look here too, once more. You see a grey moving cloud about that
pebble bed, and underneath that bank. It is a countless swarm of
'sug,' or water-shrimp; a bad food, but devoured greedily by the
great trout in certain overstocked preserves.

Add to these plenty of minnow, stone-loach, and miller's thumbs, a
second course of young crayfish, and for one gormandizing week of
bliss, thousands of the great green-drake fly: and you have food
enough for a stock of trout which surprise, by their size and number,
an angler fresh from the mountain districts of the north and west.
To such a fisherman, the tale of Mr. ** *, of Ramsbury, who is said
to have killed in one day in his own streams on Kennet, seventy-six
trout, all above a pound, sounds like a traveller's imagination: yet
the fact is, I believe, accurately true.

This, however, is an extraordinary case upon an extraordinary stream.
In general, if a man shall bring home (beside small fish) a couple of
brace of from one to three pounds apiece, he may consider himself as
a happy man, and that the heavens have not shone, but frowned, upon