hem to a number
incredible, and you may take them twenty or forty in an hour, but none
greater than about the size of a gudgeon: there are also in divers
rivers, especially that relate to or be near to the sea, as
Winchester, or the Thames about Windsor, a little trout called samlet,
or skegger trout (in both which places I have caught twenty or forty
at a standing), that will bite as fast and as freely as minnows; these
be by some taken to be young salmon; but in those waters they never
grow to be bigger than a herring.

There is also in Kent, near to Canterbury, a trout called there a
Fordidge trout, a trout that bears the name of the town where it is
usually caught, that is accounted the rarest of fish; many of them
near the bigness of a salmon, but known by their different color; and
in their best season they cut very white; and none of these have been
known to be caught with an angle, unless it were one that was caught
by Sir George Hastings, an excellent angler, and now with God: and he
hath told me, he thought _that_ trout bit not for hunger but
wantonness; and it is rather to be believed, because both he, then,
and many others before him, have been curious to search into their
bellies, what the food was by which they lived, and have found out
nothing by which they might satisfy their curiosity.

Concerning which you are to take notice, that it is reported by good
authors, that grasshoppers, and some fish, have no mouths, but are
nourished and take breath by the porousness of their gills, man knows
not how: and this may be believed, if we consider that when the raven
hath hatched her eggs, she takes no further care, but leaves her young
ones to the care of the God of nature, who is said, in the Psalms, "to
feed the young ravens that call upon Him." And they be kept alive and
fed by dew, or worms that breed in their nests, or some other ways
that we mortals know not; and this may be believed of the Fordidge
trout, which, as it is said of the stork (Jerem. viii: 7), that "he
knows his season," so he knows his times, I think almost his day of
coming into the river out of the sea, where he lives, and, it is like,
feeds nine months of the year, and fasts three in the river of
Fordidge. And you are to note that those townsmen are very punctual in
observing the time of beginning to fish for them, and boast much that
their river affords a trout that exceeds all others. And just so does
Sussex boast of several fish; as