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of it. He is, in short, no fisherman, and his fishing is not a sport, but an occupation.

Look at another drawing of the picture. It is half-past four on a July morning, and before the carrion crows have finished scavenging the streets of the straggling seaside town any one who is up and about can tell that it is going to be a day of blazing sunshine. That is why the fishermen down at the quay have all got their boats out early, for they know that with a brazen sun on this clear water the mackerel must be caught before nine or ten, or they will drop down into the deeps, not to be enticed by any kind of bait until moonlight has cooled the surfacewater. All but one of the boats will be out "hand-lining" for mackerel this morning, to return, if their owners are lucky, with ten or twelve dozen fish, which will fetch a penny apiece on lean days, and anything from six-pence a dozen to ten a penny when the bay is full of mackerel and any duffer can catch as many as he pleases. The last boat, however, is not going mackerelfishing. She carries two fishermen, one of whom is her owner, and the other his son-in-law, formerly a full private in a Line regiment, and a firstrate man in a boat. Both are men of few words, the elder, copper-skinned and with eyes as blue as his blouse, giving short, quiet orders which the younger obeys swiftly and with astonishing strength. Third, the "Victoria Maud" carries a passenger engaged in putting together a short, stiff rod, and fitting a trace of single salmon-gut, eighteen feet of it, to a thin green line wound on a seven-inch reel. His quarry is not mackerel, but bass, the handsomest, and, excepting the seatrout, the princeliest fighter of all saltwater fish,-not the heavy twelve or twenty pound bass who in July is cruising round seaweed palaces in deep water, and who does not come to the

surface till September, but the shoal bass, weighing anything from one to six pounds. If he is lucky, he will fall in with a shoal perhaps three miles away out to sea, playing over a famous sunken rock that juts up from the sandy sea-floor, as big as a battleship and half as dangerous to ignorant pilots. Meanwhile, during the fifty or sixty minutes which it takes in a light wind to cover the three miles, the hand-lines are let down for mackerel, and at irregular intervals there is a double tug at the line trailing from the stern or boomed out from an oar on the weather side, and a bar of tapered silver, striped and iridescent with green and mauve and apricot, splatters on the clean deck to be sent drumming into darkness under the boarding. But the mackerel lines are soon lifted. The elder fisherman, with one hand on the tiller, has been shading his eyes and staring out over the heaving water ahead. If he were not carrying a passenger he would say nothing. "Can you see the birds, master?" he asks quietly, and suddenly across the wind comes the mingled scream of a thousand gulls. They are swooping and screaming over the sunken rock, chasing the "bait"-the real, glittering whitebait that so seldom comes to table-driven helter-skelter a few inches under the surface by the feeding shoal bass. You can stand up in the bows and watch the fish plunge and dart and dive in the clear sea-water, their wide mouths open and their fins spread, moving like strong, gray ghosts after the scudding bait, and dipping instantaneously three fathoms under the black bows of the oncoming boat. The fishermen have shortened sail, for the wind has freshened, and if the boat ran too fast across these racing tides there would be no keeping the spinner at the end of your salmon-trace under water. Nothing coarser than single gut will catch bass to-day, and even so,

the glittering spinner with its large triangle hook must swim sixty or seventy yards behind the boat, so shy are the feeding fish. The birds and the bass and the bait are all round the little lugger now: great white herring gulls introducing their drab, uncouth nestlings to fishing in deep waters a mile from the uncleanly rocks where they screamed welcome to their parents a month ago; slim-necked guillemots silently diving and swallowing and diving again; red-footed puffins, squattering over the ripples under the bows; shearwaters skimming with their level, partridge-like flight just clear of the waves; and once a flash of black and white from fifty yards up in the air, a heavy plunge into dancing water, and a great gannet rises on the surface with a mackerel in his beak. The boat sails on across the tide, and the screaming birds are now fifty yards behind her. Suddenly the rod-fisher's line, curving out astern, rips the water like a razor, and the rod-point dips and tugs. His left hand shifts on the butt, and his right goes to the whirling reel; it is as much as he dares to check the furious pull at the gut seventy yards away, for the pace of the boat and the strength of the tide add enormously to the strain on his line. The sail flaps idly as the tiller goes over, and the boat comes round, allowing him to reel in half-a-dozen yards of line before his quarry can tug the gut taut again. He is a gallant fish, and disputes every inch of the long path to the side of the boat; and if he weighs but three pounds, he has fought in that tumbling current angrily and bravely, just as his cousin the perch fights in fresh water. He has a dangerous back-fin, too, and when he has had to give in to the relentless pull of gut and silk, he will still wound his enemy with his spines, if he is not swung dexterously between oilskin-clad knees to push the hook from his wide mouth. He is the first

The Spectator.

fish of the day, and of the average weight; if a rare six-pounder strains the strength of the gut and the skill of the fisherman almost to breakingpoint, there will be two-pounders, and perhaps smaller, to bring the average down. But if the fish are in a taking mood, and the wind and water suitwhich is by no means the rule in the difficult game of bass-fishing-the rodfisher may with good fortune get into the boat ten or a dozen shining, shapely bass in a morning's sport,—that is, in the two or three hours when the fish are really feeding. Each fish means a cleverly managed piece of sailing, so as to drive through the centre of the shifting shoal, and each three-pounder brought into the boat means at least a little luck in the fight on the side of the fisherman.

That is one meaning of the word "sea-fishing." It can mean other things. It can mean swinging at anchor in a racing tide, and measuring the strength of finer gut and smaller hooks than the hand-line fisherman dare use, against the weight and the will of twelve-pound pollock, boring down into their fastnesses in the green and umber seaweed; or it may mean fighting every foot of a line seven fathom deep, swung down into moonlit water, until the great conger is gaffed in a splatter of salt spray, and noses pig-like about the floor of the boat, an uncomfortable companion for the row home at midnight. But it is the bass-fisher, sailing backwards and forwards through the screaming gulls and the chasing fish, with the scent of bedstraw and clover and the whistle of the curlew coming down wind off the land, and the rod-butt tuggling at his fore-arm, who knows the best that sea-fishing can mean. The salmonfisher and the "dry-fly purist" may hardly realize that he exists, but he knows how much they ought to envy him.

BOOKS AND AUTHORS.

Mr. Gilbert K. Chesterton, one of the most brilliant of contemporary essayists, has written a monograph upon Charles Dickens, the purpose of which is to emphasize the buoyant optimism of Dickens as contrasted with the Laodicean outlook of later writers.

Among books of an artistic interest promised for publication this fall is a study of Blake the man, the poet and the artist-by Mr. Laurence Binyon, to be issued in two volumes quarto. The first will contain a complete set of the Illustrations of the Book of Job, reproduced in photogravure in the exact size of the originals; the second, fifty-four plates of The Songs of Innocence and Experience, reproduced in size and color of the originals from the copy lately in the possession of Lord Crewe.

Messrs. Longmans and Co. have nearly ready, in two volumes, the "Letters, Personal and Literary, of Robert Earl of Lytton (Owen Meredith)." Lady Betty Balfour is editing this memorial of her father, who had as his friends, and had correspondence with, many notable men in the world of affairs and among the foremost representatives of art and literature throughout four decades (1850-90) of last century. It was in 1855, that "Clytemnestra," which, like nearly all the Earl of Lytton's books, was published under the pseudonym "Owen Meredith," appeared.

The autumn list of the Macmillans is, as usual, rich in fiction. It includes new novels by Jack London, F. Marion Crawford, Israel Zangwill, Charles Egbert Craddock (Miss Murfee) Pierre

Loti, E. V. Lucas and R. Lawrence Donne. In history, the Macmillans promise the completion of Mr. Rhodes's History of the United States and of Herbert Paul's History of Modern England: the fourth volume of the Cambridge Modern History, dealing with the Thirty Years' War; and the first volume of "A History of Rome in the Middle Ages," by F. Marion Crawford and Professor Guiseppe Tomassetti.

Biography continues to hold a leading place in contemporary literature. The fall announcements of a single London publishing house, the Methuens, includes: "From Midshipman to Field-Marshal," Sir Evelyn Wood's Story of His Life; "Marie Antoinette," by Hilaire Belloc; "Beauties of the Seventeenth Century," by Allan Fea; "Garrick and his Circle," by Mrs. Clement Parsons; "The Life of Henry Stuart, Cardinal York," by H. M. Vaughan; "Thomas à Kempis, his Age and Book," by J. E. G. de Montmorency; "George Herbert and His Times," by A. G. Hyde; "St. Catherine and Her Times," by Margaret Roberts; "Queen Louisa of Prussia," by Mary M. Moffat; and another life of "Nelson's Lady Hamilton," by E. Hallam Moorhouse.

The Cambridge University Press have ready a Bible so printed that both the Authorized and Revised Versions may be read from the same text, without difficulty and without need of reference from text to margin or from one text to a second. The method adopted is to print in large type such words as are common to both Versions. Where there is a difference between the

Versions, however minute, the one line of large type divides into two parallel lines of smaller type, of which the upper gives the reading of the Revised and the lower that of the Authorized Version. Thus, by reading along the large type and following, where it ceases, the upper of the two small lines, the Revised Version may be read; while the large type, in conjunction with the lower of the small lines, gives the continuous text of the Authorized Version.

The Dickensian is happy in having come into possession of the office-book of Household Words during the period of Charles Dickens's editorship. Every thing in the paper, except the serials, appeared anonymously; and the attempts hitherto made to pick out Dickens's own writings have been largely guesswork. But the office book tabulated each week the titles of the articles and poems, with the authors' names and the prices paid. The Dickensian observes that some of the articles commonly attributed to Dickens were not written by him at all. To quote one instance only, on 16 June, 1855, appeared "By Rail to Parnassus." This is not only attributed to Dickens in Kitton's and other bibliographies, but is quoted more than once in Professor Ward's volume on Dickens in the English Men of Letters series as being autobiographical. As a matter of fact, the article was written by Henry Morley.

Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co. have begun the publication of a new definitive edition of the works of Mrs. Gaskell, to which is given the title of "The Knutsford Edition." The edition will be in eight volumes, these being issued at fortnightly intervals, and there will be an introduction to each volume, in addition to a biographical introduction

in the first issue by the Master of Peterhouse, writing with the assistance of the Misses Gaskell, to whom, by their permission, he dedicates this edition of the works of their mother. Each volume will contain a frontispiece in photogravure, one being a portrait of Mrs. Gaskell by George Richmond, R.A., and another an unpublished portrait from a drawing by Samuel Laurence, besides other illustrations and a facsimile MS. The works will be arranged as far as is possible in chronological order, and will include several contributions to periodicals hitherto unreprinted, together with two poems and some unpublished fragments of stories.

An autograph letter of Sir Walter Scott, sold recently at a London auction sale, was addressed to Anna Seward on receipt of her criticism of "Marmion." Praised by Samuel Johnson, and admired as a writer by Macaulay, Anna Seward, now completely forgotten, corresponded with Scott for some years before her death in 1809, and then made him her literary executor. The letter of Sir Walter is of peculiar interest: "It is long since I have been honored with your kind letter containing so favorable and partial an analysis of 'Marmion.' It is now lying before me, and the contents are enough to warm my blood to the finger ends, although our coals are all expended, the snow lying two feet deep, and the roads impassable. My reason for transporting 'Marmion from Lichfield was to make good the minstrel prophecy of Constance's song. Why I should ever have taken him there I cannot very well say. Attachment to the place-its locality with respect to Tamworth, the ancient seat of the Marmions; partly, perhaps, the whim of taking a slap at Lord Brooke en passant."

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Robert Schumann. By Herbert Antcliffe.

TWENTIETH CENTURY QUARTERLY 724

Wild Wheat. Chapter XXI. The Cottage on the Downs. Chapter
XXII. New Year Bells. By M.E. Francis.

LONGMAN'S MAGAZINE 731

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VI.

VII.

With Wires and Without. By Maurice Solomon.
On Windy Hill. Chapter III. How Two Met by Candlelight. Chap-
ter IV. How the Long Night Ended. By Halliwell Sutcliffe.
(To be concluded.)
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