after which he was wont to expel several
vehement whiffs from his pipe, and, knitting his
brows, gaze ruefully at Joe Copal's unliquidated
score, which to this day remains in full
chalk characters behind the parlour door; it
being as much as Dorothy the pretty
barmaid's place is worth to meddle with, or hint
about effacing it. Groundbait has looked at
it a good many times since the discovery of
the gold fields of Australia, as he has an idea
that Texas may be somewhere that way, and
that Joe, coming back repentant some day
with a store of nuggets, may call in and
settle it.

The Swan has been a fishing house for
years, not only as in the neighbourhood of a
fishing stream and the resort of metropolitan
anglers, but also as a species of house of call
for freshwater fishermen—a piscatorial
clearing house—a fishing news exchange, a
social clubhouse for the amateurs of the rod
and line.

The little bar parlour of the Swan, which is
of no particular shape and has a paper
ceiling, has a door covered on the inner side
half by a coloured mezzotint of George the
Third in jack boots, on a horse like a
gambolling hippopotamus, reviewing one hundred
thousand volunteers in Hyde Park; half by
the famous abacus, or slate—the tabular record
of scores. Dorothy, the "neat-handed Phillis"
of the Swan, albeit a ready reckoner and an
accomplished artiste in stewing carp and
frying smelts, is not a very apt scholar; so she
has devised a system of financial hieroglyphics
to cover her want of proficiency in the
delineation of the Arabic numerals. Thus, in her
money alphabet, a circle {IMAGE: bracketed circle} stands for a
shilling; a half moon {IMAGE: bracketed crescent moon } for sixpence, a
Maltese cross for a penny, and a Greek ditto
for a halfpenny. Farthings are beneath the
calculations of the Swan; and pounds are
represented by a very large {IMAGE: text: [large O]} indeed: the
agglomeration of a score of circles into one
circumference. The room is hung round with
badges and trophies of the piscatorial craft.
Rods of all shapes and sizes, eel spears,
winches, landing nets, Penelopean webs of
fishing tackle, glistering armouries of hooks,
harpoons, panniers, bait-cans; and in a glass
case a most wonderful piscatorio-entomological
collection of flies—flies of gorgeously tinted
floss silk, pheasants' feathers, and gold and
silver thread flies warranted to deceive the
acutest of fish; though if, viewed through a
watery medium, the flies come no nearer
Nature than these do, I have no great opinion
of the fishes' discernment. With all due
reverence for the Eleusinian mysteries of
fly-fishing—which I do not understand, be it said.
Over the fire-place is the identical rod and
line with which J. Barbell, Esq., hooked the
monstrous and European-famed jack in the
river Dodder, near Dublin, and in the
year of grace eighteen hundred and thirty-nine;
in one corner are the shovel and
bucket with and in which at the same
place and time the said jack, after being
walked seven miles down the banks of the
Dodder, and cracking the rod into innumerable
fissures (though the superior article, one
of Cheek's best, would not break), was
ultimately landed. Conspicuous between the
windows is the portrait of J. Barbell, Esq., a
hairy-faced man, severely scourging a river
with a rod like a May-pole; beneath that, the
famous jack himself in propriâ personâ, in a
glass case, stuffed, very brown and horny
with varnish, with great staring glass eyes
(one cracked), and a mouth wide open grinning
hideously. He is swimming vigorously through
nothing at all, and has a neat fore-ground of
moss and Brighton-beach shells, and a backing
of pea-green sky. There are very many other
glass cases, containing the mummies of other
famous jacks, trout, roach, dace, and carp,
including the well-known perch which was
captured after being heard of for five years in
the back waters of the Thames near Reading,
and has a back fin nearly as large as Madame
de Pompadour's fan. Not forgetting a well-
thumbed copy of dear old Izaak's Complete
Angler; a price-list of fishing materials sold
at the Golden Perch or the Silver Roach, in
London, with manuscript comments of anglers
as to the quality thereof pencilled on the
margin, and the contributions of the ingenious
Ephemera to Bell's Life in London, cut from
that journal and pasted together on the leaves
of an old cheesemonger's day-book; not
forgetting these with a certain fishy smell
prevalent, I think I have drawn the parlour of
the Swan for you pretty correctly. The first
thing you should do on entering this sanctuary
of fishing is to keep your skirts very close to
your person, and to duck your head a little—
the air being at times charged with animal
matter in the shape of dried entrails twisted
into fishing-lines, which flying about, and
winding round your clothes or in your hair,
produce a state of entanglement more Gordian
than pleasant. The chairs and other articles
of furniture are also more or less garnished
with hooks of various sizes, dropped from the
parchment hook-books of the gentlemen fishermen.
These protrude imperceptibly, but
dangerously, like quills upon the fretful
porcupine; and it is as well to examine your
chair with a magnifying glass, or to cause a
friend to occupy it preliminarily, before you
sit down in it yourself.

If you come to the Swan to fish you cannot
do better than tackle (I do not use the word
with the slightest intention of punning,)
Groundbait, the landlord, immediately. That
Boniface will be but too happy to tell you the
latest fishing news, the most approved fishing
places, the neighbouring gentry who give
permissions to fish. He knows of fish in
places you would never dream of: he has
cunningly devised receipts for ground bait:
his butcher is the butcher for gentles, his
oil-shops are the shops for greaves; he has
hooks that every fish that ever was spawned