of view,
with too much fuss and fad as to their impedimenta? Some anglers whom
I meet really never appear to be happy unless staggering along like
Issachar "couching down between two burdens." Half of the gear is mere
ballast, never produced for actual service from one year's end to the
other, but always carried with patience most instructive to behold.
Not a month since I remonstrated with a comrade upon the unnecessary
exertion he was undergoing from the mere weight of his useless baggage.
He said he preferred it; he considered that he was not properly
equipped without that enormous sack--big as that which the "Pilgrim's
Progress" man shuffled off when he scrambled out on the right side of
the Slough of Despond. I think he regarded the trip to the
river--though we drove comfortably to it, and drove home again the same
evening--as a serious expedition into unknown wilds, and was buoyed up
throughout with the fancy that he ranked with the eminent explorers who
go forth with their lives in their hands.

Once upon a time I habitually made a toil of pleasure in much the same
way, scorning assistance, deeming it unworthy of a British sportsman to
accept help from boy or man in any shape or form. But the golden days
all too soon become the bronze, and maybe iron, and then we naturally
pay more attention to trifling comforts and easements than in the happy
period of unchastened exuberance. The stage is eventually reached when
you will never sling creel or bag to shoulder if another can be found
to carry them; never gaff or net a fish unless obliged in your own
interests to do so, or in rendering friendly help to a comrade; never
bow your shoulders to a load which another will bear; and when, as a
matter of course, you will hand over your rod for the keeper to carry
as you pass from pool to pool.

But though you may avoid superfluities, and entertain an instinctive
horror of effeminate luxuries, there are some things quite necessary.
Food comes first. The view of angling taken by comic men in the
papers, and satirists out of them, is that eating and drinking are the
principal amusement of anglers. The citizen party in a Thames punt on
a hot summer day makes it so, very often, no doubt; and hence the
caricatures of anglers who get a very small amount of fishing to an
intolerable amount of sack. This is of course a cockney view of what,
without offence, I will term a cockney proceeding. In the real angling
of the ord