Prose Idylls, New and Old

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Charles Kingsley. Prose Idylls, New and Old

I ‘A CHARM OF BIRDS.’ 1

II. CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 2

III. THE FENS

IV. MY WINTER GARDEN. 5

V. FROM OCEAN TO SEA

VI. NORTH DEVON. 6

I.—Exmoor

II.—The Coast Line

III.—Morte

IV.—Clovelly

V.—Lundy

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Say, rather, Blessed is he who expecteth everything, for he enjoys everything once at least: and if it falls out true, twice also.

Yes.  Pleasant enough is mountain fishing.  But there is one objection against it, that it is hard work to get to it; and that the angler, often enough half-tired before he arrives at his stream or lake, has left for his day’s work only the lees of his nervous energy.

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Look on the soft muddy bottom.  You see numberless bits of stick.  Watch awhile, and those sticks are alive, crawling and tumbling over each other.  The weed, too, is full of smaller ones.  Those live sticks are the larva-cases of the Caperers—Phryganeæ—of which one family nearly two hundred species have been already found in Great Britain.  Fish up one, and you find, amid sticks and pebbles, a comfortable silk case, tenanted by a goodly grub.  Six legs he has, like all insects, and tufts of white horns on each ring of his abdomen, which are his gills.  A goodly pair of jaws he has too, and does good service with them: for he is the great water scavenger.  Decaying vegetable matter is his food, and with those jaws he will bark a dead stick as neatly as you will with a penknife.  But he does not refuse animal matter.  A dead brother (his, not yours) makes a savoury meal for him; and a party of those Vorticellæ would stand a poor chance if he came across them.  You may count these caddis baits by hundreds of thousands; whether the trout eat them case and all, is a question in these streams.  In some rivers the trout do so; and what is curious, during the spring, have a regular gizzard, a temporary thickening of the coats of the stomach, to enable them to grind the pebbly cases of the caddises.  See! here is one whose house is closed at both ends—‘grillé,’ as Pictet calls it, in his unrivalled monograph of the Genevese Phryganeæ, on which he spent four years of untiring labour.  The grub has stopped the mouth of his case by an open network of silk, defended by small pebbles, through which the water may pass freely, while he changes into his nymph state.  Open the case; you find within not a grub, but a strange bird-beaked creature, with long legs and horns laid flat by its sides, and miniature wings on its back.  Observe that the sides of the tail, and one pair of legs, are fringed with dark hairs.  After a fortnight’s rest in this prison this ‘nymph’ will gnaw her way out and swim through the water on her back, by means of that fringed tail and paddles, till she reaches the bank and the upper air.  There, under the genial light of day, her skin will burst, and a four-winged fly emerge, to buzz over the water as a fawn-coloured Caperer—deadliest of trout flies; if she be not snapped up beforehand under water by some spotted monarch in search of supper.

Some, again, have the gills on their sides larger and broader, and no whisks at the tail.  These are the larvæ of Sialis, the black alder, Lord Stowell’s fly, shorm fly, hunch-back of the Welsh, with which we have caught our best fish to-day.

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