See these
transparent brown snails, Limneae and Succinae, 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.
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