of the most closely perforated banks they lay like a red fringe along the
riverside under the water. Near Oxford, and up the Cherwell, Windrush, and
other streams they were, before the pestilence, so numerous that making
crayfish pots was as much a local industry as making eel-pots, the smaller
withes, not much larger than a thick straw, being used for this purpose.
Most cottages near the river had one or two of these pots, which were
baited on summer nights and laid in the bottom of the stream near the
crayfish holes. It must be supposed that they only use them by day, and
come out by night, just as lobsters do, to roam about and seek food on a
larger scale than that which they seize as it floats past their holes by
day. That time of more or less enforced idleness the crayfish used to
spend in looking out of their holes with their claws hanging just over the
edge ready to seize and haul in anything nice that floated by. Their
appetite by night was such that no form of animal food came amiss to them.
The "pots" were baited with most unpleasant dainties, but nasty as these
were they were not so unsavoury as the food which the crayfish found for
themselves and thoroughly enjoyed, such as dead water-rats and dead fish,
worms, snails, and larvae. They were always hungry, and one of the
simplest ways of catching them was to push into their holes a gloved
finger, which the creature always seized with its claw and tried to drag
further in. The crayfish, who, like the lobster, looked on it as a point
of honour never to let go, was then jerked out into a basket. They rather
liked the neighbourhood of towns and villages because plenty of dirty
refuse was thrown into the water. In the canalised stream which runs into
Oxford city itself there were numbers, which not only burrowed in the
bank, but made homes in all the chinks of stone and brick river walls, and
sides of locks, and in the wood of the weiring, where they sat ensconced
as snugly as crickets round a brick farmhouse kitchen fireplace. They were
regularly caught by the families of the riverine population of boatmen,
bargees, and waterside labourers, and sold in the Oxford market. A dish of