Excerpt from An Open CreelFishing is very like the other pursuits of men, com pact of ill and good, the good being, as we think, not too lavishly bestowed on some of us. The season of any given angler (i except those prodigious fellows who never have a blank, who think in dozens and stones, and who cannot but come to a bad piscatorial end) is a calculable affair. Of the total number of his days, probably two-thirds will give him no results worth mentioning. Three-quarters of the rest will be of the type conveniently labelled as fair to middling. And there may be two or three days of really fine sport, days about which he at once writes articles. An article or so may be written about days of the second class, but about those of the first there is a grim silence. Hence the number of fish in a book on fishing.Francis Francis, I believe, once dryly remarked to an ecstatic angler who was eloquent upon the beauties of nature and the unimportance of slaughter that it doubtless was so, but he himself had noticed a kind of prejudice in favour of a brace of fish in the creel. He was quite right, of course. We all go out to catch fish. Circumstances make it harder for us to do so year by year, there are more of us, and waters are no more numerous, less rather, while fish grow daily more experienced. Therefore we probably do not expect to catch so much as did our fathers, and the sort of day which they would have regarded as middling is received by us in humble thankfulness as a glorious occasion. The standard of expectation is decidedly lower than it used to be.'About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.