Prose Idylls, New and Old

What was to be done?  Take him down-stream through the weed?  Alas, on the man’s left hand an old pollard leant into the water, barring all downward movement.  Jump in and run round?  He had rather to run back from the bank, from fear of a loose line; the fish was coming at him so fast that there was no time to wind up.  Safe into the weeds hurls the fish; the man, as soon as he finds the fish stop, jumps in mid-leg deep, and staggers up to him, in hopes of clearing; finds the dropper fast in the weeds, and the stretcher, which had been in the fish’s mouth, wantoning somewhere in the depths—Quid plura?  Let us draw a veil over that man’s return to shore.

No mortal skill could have killed that fish.  Mortal luck (which is sometimes, as most statesmen know, very great) might have done it, if the fish had been irretrievably fast hooked; as, per contra, I once saw a fish of nearly four pounds hooked just above an alder bush, on the same bank as the angler.  The stream was swift: there was a great weed-bed above; the man had but about ten feet square of swift water to kill the trout in.  Not a foot down-stream could he take him; in fact, he had to pull him hard up-stream to keep him out of his hover in the alder roots.  Three times that fish leapt into the air nearly a yard high; and yet, so merciful is luck, and so firmly was he hooked, in five breathless minutes he was in the landing-net; and when he was there and safe ashore, just of the shape and colour of a silver spoon, his captor lay down panting upon the bank, and with Sir Hugh Evans, manifested ‘a great disposition to cry.’  But it was a beautiful sight.  A sharper round between man and fish never saw I fought in Merry England.

I saw once, however, a cleverer, though not a more dashing feat.  A handy little fellow (I wonder where he is now?) hooked a trout of nearly three pounds with his dropper, and at the same moment a post with his stretcher.  What was to be done?  To keep the fish pulling on him, and not on the post.  And that, being favoured by standing on a four-foot bank, he did so well that he tired out the fish in some six feet square of water, stopping him and turning him beautifully whenever he tried to run, till I could get in to him with the landing-net.  That was five-and-thirty years since.  If the little man has progressed in his fishing as he ought, he should be now one of the finest anglers in England.

* * * * *

So.  Thanks to bank fishing, we have, you see, landed three or four more good fish in the last two hours—And!  What is here?  An ugly two-pound chub, Chevin, ‘Echevin,’ or Alderman, as the French call him.  How is this, keeper?  I thought you allowed no such vermin in this water?

The keeper answers, with a grunt, that ‘they allow themselves.  That there always were chub hereabouts, and always will be; for the more he takes out with the net, the more come next day.’

Probably.  No nets will exterminate these spawn-eating, fry-eating, all-eating pests, who devour the little trout, and starve the large ones, and, at the first sign of the net, fly to hover among the most tangled roots.  There they lie, as close as rats in a bank, and work themselves the farther in the more they are splashed and poked by the poles of the beaters.  But the fly, well used, will—if not exterminate them—still thin them down greatly; and very good sport they give, in my opinion, in spite of the contempt in which they are commonly held, as chicken-hearted fish, who show no fight.  True; but their very cowardice makes them the more difficult to catch; for no fish must you keep more out of sight, and further off.  The very shadow of the line (not to mention that of the rod) sends them flying to hover; and they rise so cautiously and quietly, that they give excellent lessons in patience and nerve to a beginner.  If the fly is dragged along the surface, or jerked suddenly from them, they flee from it in terror; and when they do, after due deliberation, take it in, their rise is so quiet, that you can seldom tell whether your fish weighs half a pound or four pounds and a half—unless you, like most beginners, attempt to show your quickness by that most useless exertion, a violent strike.  Then, the snapping of your footlink, or—just as likely—of the top of your rod, makes you fully aware, if not of the pluck, at least of the brute strength, of the burly alderman of the waters.  No fish, therefore, will better teach the beginner the good old lesson, ‘not to frighten a fish before you have tired him.’

For flies—chub will rise greedily at any large palmers, the larger and rougher the better.  A red and a grizzled hackle will always take them; but the best fly of all is an imitation of the black beetle—the ‘undertaker’ of the London shops.  He, too, can hardly be too large, and should be made of a fat body of black wool, with the metallic black feather of a cock’s tail wrapped loosely over it.  A still better wing is one of the neck feathers of any metallic-plumed bird, e.g., Phlogophorus Impeyanus, the Menaul Pheasant, laid flat and whole on the back, to imitate the wing-shells of the beetle, the legs being represented by any loose black feathers—(not hackles, which are too fine.)  Tied thus, it will kill not only every chub in a pool (if you give the survivors a quarter of an hour wherein to recover from their horror at their last friend’s fate), but also, here and there, very large trout.

Another slur upon the noble sport of chub fishing is the fact of his not being worth eating—a fact which, in the true sportsman’s eyes, will go for nothing.  But though the man who can buy fresh soles and salmon may despise chub, there are those who do not.  True, you may make a most accurate imitation of him by taking one of Palmer’s patent candles, wick and all, stuffing it with needles and split bristles, and then stewing the same in ditch-water.  Nevertheless, strange to say, the agricultural stomach digests chub; and if, after having filled your creel, or three creels (as you may too often), with them, you will distribute them on your way home to all the old women you meet, you will make many poor souls happy, after having saved the lives of many trout.

But here we come to a strip of thick cover, part of our Squire’s home preserves, which it is impossible to fish, so closely do the boughs cover the water.  We will walk on through it towards the hall, and there get—what we begin sorely to need—something to eat.  It will be of little use fishing for some time to come; for these hot hours of the afternoon, from three till six, are generally the ‘deadest time’ of the whole day.

And now, when we have struggled in imagination through the last bit of copse, and tumbled over the palings into the lawn, we shall see a scene quite as lovely, if you will believe it, as any alp on earth.

What shall we see, as we look across the broad, still, clear river, where the great dark trout sail to and fro lazily in the sun?  For having free-warren of our fancy and our paper, we may see what we choose.

White chalk-fields above, quivering hazy in the heat.  A park full of merry haymakers; gay red and blue waggons; stalwart horses switching off the flies; dark avenues of tall elms; groups of abele, ‘tossing their whispering silver to the sun;’ and amid them the house.  What manner of house shall it be?  Tudor or Elizabethan, with oriels, mullioned windows, gables, and turrets of strange shape?  No: that is commonplace.  Everybody builds Tudor houses now.  Our house shall smack of Inigo Jones or Christopher Wren; a great square red-brick mass, made light and cheerful though, by quoins and windows of white Sarsden stone; with high-peaked French roofs, broken by louvres and dormers, haunted by a thousand swallows and starlings.  Old walled gardens, gay with flowers, shall stretch right and left.  Clipt yew alleys shall wander away into mysterious glooms: and out of their black arches shall come tripping children, like white fairies, to laugh and talk with the girl who lies dreaming and reading in the hammock there, beneath the black velvet canopy of the great cedar-tree, like some fair Tropic flower hanging from its boughs.  Then they shall wander down across the smooth-shorn lawn, where the purple rhododendrons hang double, bush and image, over the water’s edge, and call to us across the stream, ‘What sport?’ and the old Squire shall beckon the keeper over the long stone bridge, and return with him bringing luncheon and good ale; and we will sit down, and eat and drink among the burdock leaves, and then watch the quiet house, and lawn, and flowers, and fair human creatures, and shining water, all sleeping breathless in the glorious light beneath the glorious blue, till we doze off, lulled by the murmur of a thousand insects, and the rich minstrelsy of nightingale and black-cap, thrush and dove.

Peaceful, graceful, complete English country life and country houses; everywhere finish and polish; Nature perfected by the wealth and art of peaceful centuries!  Why should I exchange you, even for the sight of all the Alps, for bad roads, bad carriages, bad inns, bad food, bad washing, bad beds, and fleas, fleas, fleas?

Let that last thought be enough.  There may be follies, there may be sorrows, there may be sins—though I know there are no very heavy ones—in that fine old house opposite: but thanks to the genius of my native land, there are at least no fleas.

Think of that, wandering friend; and of this also, that you will find your warm bath ready when you go to bed to-night, and your cold one when you rise to-morrow morning; and in content and thankfulness, stay in England, and be clean.

* * * *

Here, then, let us lounge a full two hours, too comfortable and too tired to care for fishing, till the hall-bell rings for that dinner which we as good anglers will despise.  Then we will make our way to the broad reaches above the house.  The evening breeze should be ruffling them gallantly; and see, the fly is getting up.  Countless thousands are rising off the grass, and flickering to and fro above the stream.  Stand still a moment, and you will hear the air full of the soft rustle of innumerable wings.  Hundreds more, even more delicate and gauzy, are rising through the water, and floating helplessly along the surface, as Aphrodite may have done when she rose in the Ægean, half frightened at the sight of the new upper world.  And, see, the great trout are moving everywhere.  Fish too large and well fed to care for the fly at any other season, who have been lounging among the weeds all day and snapping at passing minnows, have come to the surface; and are feeding steadily, splashing five or six times in succession, and then going down awhile to bolt their mouthful of victims; while here and there a heavy silent swirl tells of a fly taken before it has reached the surface, untimely slain before it has seen the day.

Now—put your Green-drake on; and throw, regardless of bank-fishing or any other rule, wherever you see a fish rise.  Do not work your flies in the least, but let them float down over the fish, or sink if they will; he is more likely to take them under water than on the top.  And mind this rule: be patient with your fish; and do not fancy that because he does not rise to you the first or the tenth time, therefore he will not rise at all.  He may have filled his mouth and gone down to gorge; and when he comes up again, if your fly be the first which he meets, he will probably seize it greedily, and all the more so if it be under water, so seeming drowned and helpless.  Besides, a fish seldom rises twice exactly in the same place, unless he be lying between two weeds, or in the corner of an eddy.  His small wits, when he is feeding in the open, seem to hint to him that after having found a fly in one place he must move a foot or two on to find another; and therefore it may be some time before your turn comes, and your fly passes just over his nose; which if it do not do, he certainly will not, amid such an abundance, go out of his way for it.  In the meanwhile your footlink will very probably have hit him over the back, or run foul of his nose, in which case you will not catch him at all.  A painful fact for you; but if you could catch every fish you saw, where would be the trout for next season?

Put on a dropper of some kind, say a caperer, as a second chance.  I almost prefer the dark claret-spinner, with which I have killed very large fish alternately with the green-drake, even when it was quite dark; and for your stretcher, of course a green-drake.

For a blustering evening like this your drake can hardly be too large or too rough; in brighter and stiller weather the fish often prefer a fly half the size of the natural one.  Only bear in mind that the most tempting form among these millions of drakes is that one whose wings are very little coloured at all, of a pale greenish yellow; whose body is straw-coloured, and his head, thorax, and legs, spotted with dark brown—best represented by a pheasant or coch-a-bonddhu hackle.

The best imitation of this, or of any drake, which I have ever seen, is one by Mr. Macgowan, whilome of Ballyshannon, now of No. 7, Bruton-street, Berkeley-square, whose drakes, known by a waxy body of some mysterious material, do surpass those of all other men, and should be known and honoured far and wide.  But failing them, you may do well with a drake which is ribbed through the whole length with red hackle over a straw-coloured body.  A North-countryman would laugh at it, and ask us how we fancy that fish will mistake for that delicate waxy fly a heavy rough palmer, made heavier and rougher by two thick tufts of yellow mallard wing: but if he will fish therewith, he will catch trout; and mighty ones they will be.  I have found, again and again, this drake, in which the hackle is ribbed all down the body, beat a bare-bodied one in the ratio of three fish to one.  The reason is difficult to guess.  Perhaps the shining transparent hackle gives the fly more of the waxy look of the natural insect; or perhaps the ‘buzzly’ look of the fly causes the fish to mistake it for one half emerged from its pupa case, fluttering, entangled, and helpless.  But whatever be the cause, I am sure of the fact.  Now—silence and sport for the next three hours.

* * * * *

There!  All things must end.  It is so dark that I have been fishing for the last five minutes without any end fly; and we have lost our two last fish simply by not being able to guide them into the net.  But what an evening’s sport we have had!  Beside several over a pound which I have thrown in (I trust you have been generous and done likewise), there are six fish averaging two pounds apiece; and what is the weight of that monster with whom I saw you wrestling dimly through the dusk, your legs stuck knee-deep in a mudbank, your head embowered in nettles, while the keeper waltzed round you, roaring mere incoherencies?—four pounds full.  Now, is there any sherry left in the flask?  No.  Then we will give the keeper five shillings; he is well worth his pay; and then drag our weary limbs towards the hall to bath, supper, and bed; while you confess, I trust, that you may get noble sport, hard exercise, and lovely scenery, without going sixty miles from London town.

III

THE FENS

A certain sadness is pardonable to one who watches the destruction of a grand natural phenomenon, even though its destruction bring blessings to the human race.  Reason and conscience tell us, that it is right and good that the Great Fen should have become, instead of a waste and howling wilderness, a garden of the Lord, where

‘All the land in flowery squares,Beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind,Smells of the coming summer.’

And yet the fancy may linger, without blame, over the shining meres, the golden reed-beds, the countless water-fowl, the strange and gaudy insects, the wild nature, the mystery, the majesty—for mystery and majesty there were—which haunted the deep fens for many a hundred years.  Little thinks the Scotsman, whirled down by the Great Northern Railway from Peterborough to Huntingdon, what a grand place, even twenty years ago, was that Holme and Whittlesea, which is now but a black, unsightly, steaming flat, from which the meres and reed-beds of the old world are gone, while the corn and roots of the new world have not as yet taken their place.

But grand enough it was, that black ugly place, when backed by Caistor Hanglands and Holme Wood, and the patches of the primæval forest; while dark-green alders, and pale-green reeds, stretched for miles round the broad lagoon, where the coot clanked, and the bittern boomed, and the sedge-bird, not content with its own sweet song, mocked the notes of all the birds around; while high overhead hung, motionless, hawk beyond hawk, buzzard beyond buzzard, kite beyond kite, as far as eye could see.  Far off, upon the silver mere, would rise a puff of smoke from a punt, invisible from its flatness and its white paint.  Then down the wind came the boom of the great stanchion-gun; and after that sound another sound, louder as it neared; a cry as of all the bells of Cambridge, and all the hounds of Cottesmore; and overhead rushed and whirled the skein of terrified wild-fowl, screaming, piping, clacking, croaking, filling the air with the hoarse rattle of their wings, while clear above all sounded the wild whistle of the curlew, and the trumpet note of the great wild swan.

They are all gone now.  No longer do the ruffs trample the sedge into a hard floor in their fighting-rings, while the sober reeves stand round, admiring the tournament of their lovers, gay with ears and tippets, no two of them alike.  Gone are ruffs and reeves, spoonbills, bitterns, avosets; the very snipe, one hears, disdains to breed.  Gone, too, not only from Whittlesea but from the whole world, is that most exquisite of English butterflies, Lycæna dispar—the great copper; and many a curious insect more.  Ah, well, at least we shall have wheat and mutton instead, and no more typhus and ague; and, it is to be hoped, no more brandy-drinking and opium-eating; and children will live and not die.  For it was a hard place to live in, the old Fen; a place wherein one heard of ‘unexampled instances of longevity,’ for the same reason that one hears of them in savage tribes—that few lived to old age at all, save those iron constitutions which nothing could break down.

And now, when the bold Fen-men, who had been fighting water by the help of wind, have given up the more capricious element for that more manageable servant fire; have replaced their wind-mills by steam-engines, which will work in all weathers; and have pumped the whole fen dry—even too dry, as the last hot summer proved; when the only bit of the primæval wilderness left, as far as I know, is 200 acres of sweet sedge and Lastræa thelypteris in Wicken Fen: there can be no harm in lingering awhile over the past, and telling of what the Great Fen was, and how it came to be that great flat which reaches (roughly speaking) from Cambridge to Peterborough on the south-west side, to Lynn and Tattershall on the north-east, some forty miles and more each way.

To do that rightly, and describe how the Fen came to be, one must go back, it seems to me, to an age before all history; an age which cannot be measured by years or centuries; an age shrouded in mystery, and to be spoken of only in guesses.  To assert anything positively concerning that age, or ages, would be to show the rashness of ignorance.  ‘I think that I believe,’ ‘I have good reason to suspect,’ ‘I seem to see,’ are the strongest forms of speech which ought to be used over a matter so vast and as yet so little elaborated.

‘I seem to see,’ then, an epoch after those strata were laid down with which geology generally deals; after the Kimmeridge clay, Oxford clay, and Gault clay, which form the impervious bedding of the fens, with their intermediate beds of coral-rag and green sand, had been deposited; after the chalk had been laid on the top of them, at the bottom of some ancient ocean; after (and what a gulf of time is implied in that last ‘after!’) the boulder-clay (coeval probably with the ‘till’ of Scotland) had been spread out in the ‘age of ice’ on top of all; after the whole had been upheaved out of the sea, and stood about the same level as it stands now: but before the great valley of the Cam had been scooped out, and the strata were still continuous, some 200 feet above Cambridge and its colleges, from the top of the Gog-magogs to the top of Madingley Rise.

In those ages—while the valleys of the Cam, the Ouse, the Nene, the Welland, the Glen, and the Witham were sawing themselves out by no violent convulsions, but simply, as I believe, by the same slow action of rain and rivers by which they are sawing backward into the land even now—I ‘seem to see’ a time when the Straits of Dover did not exist—a time when a great part of the German Ocean was dry land.  Through it, into a great estuary between North Britain and Norway, flowed together all the rivers of north-eastern Europe—Elbe, Weser, Rhine, Scheldt, Seine, Thames, and all the rivers of east England, as far north as the Humber.

And if a reason be required for so daring a theory—first started, if I recollect right, by the late lamented Edward Forbes—a sufficient one may be found in one look over a bridge, in any river of the East of England.  There we see various species of Cyprinidæ, ‘rough’ or ‘white’ fish—roach, dace, chub, bream, and so forth, and with them their natural attendant and devourer, the pike.

Now these fish belong almost exclusively to the same system of rivers—those of north-east Europe.  They attain their highest development in the great lakes of Sweden.  Westward of the Straits of Dover they are not indigenous.  They may be found in the streams of south and western England; but in every case, I believe, they have been introduced either by birds or by men.  From some now submerged ‘centre of creation’ (to use poor Edward Forbes’s formula) they must have spread into the rivers where they are now found; and spread by fresh water, and not by salt, which would destroy them in a single tide.

Again, there lingers in the Cam, and a few other rivers of north-eastern Europe, that curious fish the eel-pout or ‘burbot’ (Molva lota).  Now he is utterly distinct from any other fresh-water fish of Europe.  His nearest ally is the ling (Molva vulgaris); a deep-sea fish, even as his ancestors have been.  Originally a deep-sea form, he has found his way up the rivers, even to Cambridge, and there remains.  The rivers by which he came up, the land through which he passed, ages and ages since, have been all swept away; and he has never found his way back to his native salt-water, but lives on in a strange land, degraded in form, dwindling in numbers, and now fast dying out.  The explanation may be strange: but it is the only one which I can offer to explain the fact—which is itself much more strange—of the burbot being found in the Fen rivers.

Another proof may be found in the presence of the edible frog of the Continent at Foulmire, on the edge of the Cambridge Fans.  It is a moot point still with some, whether he was not put there by man.  It is a still stronger argument against his being indigenous, that he is never mentioned as an article of food by the mediæval monks, who would have known—Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, as many of them were—that he is as dainty as ever was a spring chicken.  But if he be indigenous, his presence proves that once he could either hop across the Straits of Dover, or swim across the German Ocean.

But there can be no doubt of the next proof—the presence in the Fens (where he is now probably extinct) and in certain spots in East Anglia, which I shall take care not to mention, of that exquisite little bird the ‘Bearded Tit’ (Calamophilus biarmicus).  Tit he is none; rather, it is said, a finch, but connected with no other English bird.  His central home is in the marshes of Russia and Prussia; his food the mollusks which swarm among the reed-beds where he builds; and feeding on those from reed-bed to reed bed, all across what was once the German Ocean, has come the beautiful little bird with long tail, orange tawny plumage, and black moustache, which might have been seen forty years ago in hundreds on ever reed-rond of the Fen.

One more proof—for it is the heaping up of facts, each minute by itself, which issues often in a sound and great result.  In draining Wretham Mere, in Norfolk, not so very far from the Fens, in the year 1856 there were found embedded in the peat moss (which is not the Scotch and Western Sphagnum palustre, but an altogether different moss, Hypnum fluitans), remains of an ancient lake-dwelling, supported on piles.  A dwelling like those which have lately attracted so much notice in the lakes of Switzerland: like those which the Dyaks make about the ports and rivers of Borneo; dwellings invented, it seems to me, to enable the inhabitants to escape not wild beasts only, but malaria and night frosts; and, perched above the cold and poisonous fogs, to sleep, if not high and dry, at least high and healthy.