Splash! Wallop! "My grasshopper, I think." "I saw it first." "Where are
you shoving to?" "O--oh--what is the matter with William?" I called him
William because he had a mark like a W on his back. But he was hooked fast
and flopping, and held quite tight by a very strong hook and gut, like a
bull with a ring and a pole fastened to his nose. I got him out too--not a
big fish, but about 1-1/2 lbs.

This showed pretty clearly that where chub can be fished for "silently,
invisibly," they can still be caught, even though steam launches or
row-boats are passing every ten minutes. This was mid-August; my next
venture nearly realised the highest ambitions of a chub-fisher. It also
showed the sad limitations of mere instinctive fishing aptitudes in the
human being as contrasted with the mental and bodily resources of a fish
with a deplorably low facial angle and a very poor _morale_. There
was just one place on the river where it seemed possible to remain unseen
yet to be able to drop a bait over a chub. A willow tree had fallen, and
smashed through a willow _bush_. Its head stuck out like a feather
brush in front and made a good screen. On either side were the boughs of
the bush, high, but not too high to get a rod over them, if I walked along
the horizontal stem of the tree. It was only a small tree, and a most
unpleasant platform. But I had caught a most appetising young frog, rather
larger than a domino, which I fastened to the hook, and after much
manoeuvring I dropped this where I knew some large chub lay. As the tree
had only been blown down a day before, I was certain that they had never
been fished for at that spot.

[Illustration: A MONSTER CHUB. _From a drawing by Lancelot Speed._]

I was right; hardly had the frog touched the water when I saw a monster
chub rise like a dark salamander out of the depths. Slowly he rose and