Excerpt from Book of the Grayling: Being a Description of the Fish, and the Art of Angling for Him, as Practised Chiefly in the Midlands and the North of England O'er yon bare knoll the pointed cedar shadows Drowse on the crisp gray moss the ploughman's call Creeps faint as smoke, from black fresh-furrowed meadows The single crow a single caw lets fall And all around me, every bush and tree, Says Autumn's here, and Winter soon will be, Who snows his soft, white sleep and silence over all. Over all, perhaps, except the Grayling the rigours of the hardest winter will not suffice to put him out of humour to treat with the angler, and a wider knowledge of his nature and his season, and further acquaintance with his accommodating characteristics, would save one of the handsomest and pluckiest of British fishes from many a base libel. Ronalds, whose Fly Fisher's Entomology must always entitle his Opinion to the highest regard of anglers, calls the Grayling an excellent fish both for sport and the table, and he is right. I suspect the truth is that some, at least, of the writers who have summarily dismissed the Grayling as an inferior fish, have known him only by his flabby behaviour when hooked during the trout season, and from beginning to end of it he is never in his best fighting condition. The Grayling spawns in spring, and not until the first breath of approaching winter has chilled the rivers and reduced the aquatic temperature, does he begin to assert himself as one of the best of British sporting fish, and by this time the majority of anglers have laid their rods aside until the return cf spring. It is in the obliging nature of this fish that he begins to come into his finest condition shortly after the trout goes out, and he continues to improve, both for the hook and the table, until. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This 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.