My Fishing Days and Fishing Ways (1906) (Hardcover)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE ROACH FISHERMAN OF THE FENS (early Experiences) The wooden-legged angler?Fishing in the fens of Lincolnshire?A day's roach fishing?Personal experiences?Fishing in the South Fortyfoot. " OHIP ahoy! ahoy ! ahoy! " rang out in hoarse but vj stentorian tones, waking the echoes in every direction and putting up a covey of partridges, which rose with one of those rattling whirrs that are so wont to startle unwary pedestrians. I gave an answering shout, and a little later a strange figure hove in sight, which, a minute after, stood by my side. He was a man past the prime of life, but tall and erect as a pine, with a restless look about his keen grey eyes, which ever and anon kept sweeping the landscape in every direction, as though he were expecting a visitor from every point of the compass. He must have been a splendid specimen of manhood in his younger days?over six feet high at sixty-five years of age, and as tough as his native pollards. Seaman and boatswain for many years in the navy, but now retired and enjoying a well-earned pension; his wooden leg peeped from under the bottom of his trousers, and as this limb reached higher than his knee and was not jointed, it gave a peculiar rolling gait to his walk. I looked upon that ancient mariner and fisherman with a veneration something akin to awe, for was he not the champion roach and tench angler of the fens in his day ? and could he not spin the strangest and most awe-inspiring yarns of his adventures in many a strange land, by flood, frost, and field ? Nothing pleased him better than to have one or two of as in his cottage on a winter's evening, and bring out in vivid colours the story of his younger days, when hardships and press-gangs were everyday experiences; for he was a lonely man, with neither w...