will gorge, lines that never break, rods that
never snap. If you would go farther a-field
after an essay at the mild suburban angling
of the River Spree, he will put you up to rare
country fishing spots, where there are trouts
of unheard of size, eels as big as serpents,
pikes so large and voracious that they gnaw
the spokes of water-wheels; of quiet
Berkshire villages, where the silver Thames
murmurs peacefully, gladsomely, innocently
between sylvan banks, through a green
thanksgiving landscape, among little islets,
quiet, sunny, sequestered as the remote
Bermudas; where the river, in fine, is a river
you may drink and lave in and rejoice over,
forgetting the bone factories and gas-works
and tanneries, the sweltering sewerage, inky
colliers, and rotting corpses below Bridge.

If you come to the Swan merely as an
observer of the world, how it is a wagging, as I
do, you may take your half-pint of neat port
with Groundbait, or shrouding yourself
behind the cloudy mantle of a pipe, study
character among the frequenters of the Swan.
Groundbait does not fish much himself. The
engineer has an objection to see himself hoist
with his own petard. Doctors never take
their own physic. Lawyers don't go to law.
Groundbait, the arbiter piscatorium, the
oracle, the expert juré of angling, seldom
takes rod in hand himself. He has curiously
a dominant passion for leaping, darting
the lancing pole, swinging by his hands,
climbing knotted ropes, and other feats
of strength and agility. He has quite a
little gymnasium in his back garden, leading
to the river a kind of gibbet, with ropes
and ladders, an erection which, when he first
took the Swan, and set up his gymnastic
apparatus, gave his neighbour and enemy, the
Reverend Gricax Typhoon, occasion to address
several stinging sermons to the congregation
sitting under him at little Adullam, touching
the near connection between publicans and
the most degraded of mankind, such as
public executioners, with a neat little his-
torical parallel concerning Mordecai and
Haman.

The angling company frequenting the
Swan are varied and eccentric. Rarely, I am
of opinion, is eccentricity so prevalent as
among Anglers. Take Mr. Jefferson Jebb,
among his intimates known as Jeff. He is
something in the City, that mysterious place,
the home of so many mysterious avocations.
Every evening during the summer months,
and every Sunday throughout the year, he
comes to the Swan to fish or to talk of
fishing. He is intensely shabby, snuffy, and
dirty, and wears a beaver hat brushed all the
wrong way and quite red with rust. On one
finger he wears a very large and sparkling
diamond ring. His boots are not boots but
bats—splay, shapeless, deformed canoes, with
bulbous excrescences on the upper leather.
When he sleeps at the Swan, and you see the
boots outside his door, they have an
inexpressibly groggy, wall-eyed, shambling
appearance and sway to and fro of their own accord
like the Logan or rocking stone in Cornwall.
I think Jeff must be in the habit of drinking
coffee at breakfast, and, purchasing dried
sole-skins wherewith to clear the decoction of the
Indian berry, be continually forgetting to
take his purchases out of his pockets, for
there is a fishy smell about him, constant but
indescribable. He never catches any fish to
speak of. He does not seem to care about
any. His principal delight is in the peculiarly
nasty process of kneading together the
compound of gravel, worms, and soaked bread,
known as ground-bait, small dumplings of
which ordinarily adhere to his hands and
habiliments. He smokes a fishy pipe, and
frequently overhauls a very greasy parchment-
covered portfolio filled with hooks. His line
or plan of conversation is consistent and
simple, but disagreeable, consisting in flatly
contradicting any assertion on angling, or,
indeed, any other topic advanced by the
surrounding company. This peculiarity, together
with a general crustiness of demeanour and
malignity of remark, have earned for him
the sobriquets of the " hedgehog," " old
rusty," " cranky Jeff," and the like. If he be
not a broker's assistant, or a Custom House
officer in the City, he must certainly be
a holder of Spanish bonds, or Mexican
scrip, or some other description of soured
financier.

The arm-chair immediately beneath the
portrait of J. Barbell, Esq., is the property, by
conquest, by seniority, and by conscription, of
Mr. Bumblecherry, Captain Bumblecherry,
who has been a brother of the angle, and
a supporter of the Swan for twenty years.
For the last five he has boarded and lodged
beneath Groundbait's hospitable roof. In his
hot youth he was an exciseman; for some
years he has been a gentleman, existing on
the superannuation allowance granted him by
a grateful country. He keeps a vehicle which
he calls a " trap," but which is, in reality, a
species of square wickerwork clothes-basket
on wheels, drawn by a vicious poney.
Bumblecherry is a very square, little old man with
a red scratch wig, a bulbous nose, and a
fangy range of teeth. He looks very nearly
as vicious as his poney. He bids you good
morning in a threatening manner; scowls
when you offer him a light for his pipe, and
not unfrequently takes leave of the parlour
company at night with the very reverse of a
benediction. He is a very bad old man; and
when he speaks to you looks very much as if
he would like to bite you. He does not believe
in anything, much, except fishing, at which
recreation he is indefatigable; fishing at all
times and all seasons when it is possible to
fish, singing the while, in a coffee-mill voice,
a dreary chant, touching "those that fish for
roach and dace." In the evening, when he
is in a decent humour, he will volunteer an
equally dismal stave called " The Watchman's