Prose Idylls, New and Old - Charles Kingsley

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and would be, if Governments governed.  What an ‘if’.

      But come; for the sun burns bright, and fishing is impossible: lie down upon the bank, above this stop.  There is a campshutting (a boarding in English) on which you can put your elbows.  Lie down on your face, and look down through two or three feet of water clear as air into the water forest where the great trout feed.

      Here; look into this opening in the milfoil and crowfoot bed.  Do you see a grey film around that sprig?  Examine it through the pocket lens.  It is a forest of glass bells, on branching stalks.  They are Vorticellæ; and every one of those bells, by the ciliary current on its rim, is scavenging the water—till a tadpole comes by and scavenges it.  How many millions of living creatures are there on that one sprig?  Look here!—a brown polype, with long waving arms—a gigantic monster, actually a full half-inch long.  He is Hydra fusca, most famous, and earliest described (I think by Trembley).  Ere we go home I may show you perhaps Hydra viridis, with long pea-green arms; and rosea, most beautiful in form and colour of all the strange family.  You see that lump, just where his stalk joins his bell-head?  That is a budding baby.  Ignorant of the joys and cares of wedlock, he increases by gemmation.  See! here is another, with a full-sized young one growing on his back.  You may tear it off if you will—he cares not.  You may cut him into a dozen pieces, they say, and each one will grow, as a potato does.  I suppose, however, that he also sends out of his mouth little free ova—medusoids—call them what you will, swimming by ciliæ, which afterwards, unless the water beetles stop them on the way, will settle down as stalked polypes, and in their turn practise some mystery of Owenian parthenogenesis, or Steenstruppian alternation of generations, in which all traditional distinctions of plant and animal, male and female, are laughed to scorn by the magnificent fecundity of the Divine imaginations.

      That dusty cloud which shakes off in the water as you move the weed, under the microscope would be one mass of exquisite forms—Desmidiæ and Diatomaceæ, and what not?  Instead of running over long names, take home a little in a bottle, put it under your microscope, and if you think good verify the species from Hassall, Ehrenberg, or other wise book; but without doing that, one glance through the lens will show you why the chalk trout grow fat.

      Do they, then, eat these infusoria?

      That is not clear.  But minnows and small fry eat them by millions; and so do tadpoles, and perhaps caddis baits and water crickets.

      What are they?

      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.

      But look again among this tangled mass of weed.  Here are more larvæ of water-flies.  Some have the sides fringed with what look like paddles, but are gills.  Of these one part have whisks at the tail, and swim freely.  They will change into ephemeræ, cock-winged ‘duns,’ with long whisked tails.  The larvæ of the famous green drake (Ephemera vulgata) are like these: but we shall not find them.  They are all changed by now into the perfect fly; and if not, they burrow about the banks, and haunt the crayfish-holes, and are not easily found.

      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.

      And here is one of a delicate yellow-green, whose tail is furnished with three broad paddle-blades.  These, I believe, are gills again.  The larva is probably that of the Yellow Sally—Chrysoperla viridis—a famous fly on hot days in May and June.  Among the pebbles there, below the fall, we should have found, a month since, a similar but much larger grub, with two paddles at his tail.  He is the ‘creeper’ of the northern streams, and changes to the great crawling stone fly (May-fly of Tweed), Perla bicaudata, an ugly creature, which runs on stones and posts, and kills right well on stormy days, when he is beaten into the stream.

      There.  Now we have the larvæ of the four great trout-fly families, Phryganeæ, Ephemeræ, Sialidæ, Perlidæ; so you have no excuse for telling—as not only Cockneys, but really good sportsmen who write on fishing, have done—such fibs as that the green drake comes out of a caddis-bait, or giving such vague generalities as, ‘this fly comes from a water-larva.’

      These are, surely, in their imperfect and perfect states, food enough to fatten many a good trout: but they are not all.  See these transparent brown snails, Limneæ and Succinæ, climbing about the posts; and these other pretty ones, coil laid within coil as flat as a shilling, Planorbis.  Many a million of these do the trout pick off the weed day by day; and no food, not even the leech, which swarms here, is more fattening.  The finest trout of the high Snowdon lakes feed almost entirely on leech and snail—baits they have none—and fatten till they cut as red as a salmon.

      Look here too, once more.  You see a grey moving cloud about that pebble bed, and underneath that bank.  It is a countless swarm of ‘sug,’ or water-shrimp; a bad food, but devoured greedily by the great trout in certain overstocked preserves.

      Add to these plenty of minnow, stone-loach, and miller’s thumbs, a second course of young crayfish, and for one gormandizing week of bliss, thousands of the great green-drake fly: and you have food enough for a stock of trout which surprise, by their size and number, an angler fresh from the mountain districts of the north and west.  To such a fisherman, the tale of Mr. ** *, of Ramsbury, who is said to have killed in one day in his own streams on Kennet, seventy-six trout, all above a pound, sounds like a traveller’s imagination: yet the fact is, I believe, accurately true.

      This, however, is an extraordinary case upon an extraordinary stream.  In general, if a man shall bring home (beside small fish) a couple of brace of from one to three pounds apiece, he may consider himself as a happy man, and that the heavens have not shone, but frowned, upon him very propitiously.

      And now comes another and an important question.  For which of all these dainty eatables, if for any, do the trout take our flies? and from that arises another.  Why are the flies with which we have been fishing this morning so large—of the size which is usually employed on a Scotch lake?  You are a North-country fisher, and are wont, upon your clear streams, to fish with nothing but the smallest gnats.  And yet our streams are as clear as yours: what can

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