our way through field and fell towards the
suspension bridge over the river, we saw, emerging from a wood, a
figure that Isaac Walton would have adopted immediately for his son
and heir. He was a good-looking young man, but so piscatorially
habilimented that there was no making out his order or degree from his
external sophistications. Round his hat were twined spare lines; on
his back, as Paris's quiver hung over his shoulder broad, was
suspended a fish-basket; an iron blade of a foot or so in length
formed the end of his rod; and, as if he had been afraid of the
disciples of the gentle Rebecca, he bore an instrument something
between a Highland claymore and a reaping-hook; and as we looked on
his accoutrements, we thought we would not be a trout in such a
neighbourhood on any consideration. Escape must be impossible for
everything with fins, from a thirty-pound salmon to a minnow. As we
got near him, he handled his rod with a skill and dexterity that left
the young waterman far behind in the management of his oars; and,
after a whisk or too in the upper air, he deposited the hook and line,
not on the ripple in the middle of the Usk, but on the bough of an
elm-tree.

"Here's a mess!" he said, with a half-despairing, half-angry look at
the entanglement. He pulled, and it seemed firmer at every tug. We
approached to render what aid we could.

"Here's a mess!" again he said.

"You can scarcely call it a kettle of fish," was our sympathizing
reply; and by the aid of crooked sticks to hold the bough with, and
the warlike weapon, which cut off some of the branches, the hook was
regained, the fly found uninjured, and with mutual good wishes we each
took off his several way.

There seems a good deal of amateur fishing in this country. In the
course of our walk to the bridge, we saw three or four individuals
flogging the water with great energy, who had evidently been fitted
out in Bond Street, or who were perhaps taking out the value of the
dresses in which they had enacted piscators at the fancy ball; but
their success, we are sorry to say, was in no degree proportioned to
the completeness of their preparations; and we suspect that people
with less adornments, and a much more scanty apparatus of flies and
fish-baskets, are the real discoverers of the treasures of the deep in
the shape of trout and sewin. This latter fish, the sewin, we may add
in passing, is a luxury of which the Usk has great reason to boast;
for it is