Shooting and Fishing in Lower Brittany Author:John Kemp 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: 20 CHANGES. CHAPTER IV. In giving an outline of the fishing resources of Brittany, I must ask the reader a second time to forget all the marvellous stories... more » he may have heard or read. In former days, no doubt trout were constantly taken that equalled in weight those in an English nobleman's preserve. Sea-trout, before the netting system came so much into fashion, were to be caught by the dozen near the mouths of the rivers and streams. Servants, according to that oft-told tale, yet true withal, may have universally made terms with their masters, rejecting salmon as an article of diet more than at the most three times a week: that was no doubt a fine time for the amateur angler. But tempora mutantur; and in even the most uncivilised districts such a state of things no longer exists. Siuce the first revolution, when all the rivers in France were thrown open to the public, or rather more strictly speaking to the wielders of the ligne volante, the lower classes have gradually become more and more enlightened as to the value of fish. They soon found that trout realized a fair price in POACHING THE RIVERS. 21 the market towns, and at all the hotels, and, later on, since the introduction of railways, that the Parisians would take and pay handsomely for any amount of salmon. No wonder that the poorest of the land became professional anglers, and that they soon became acquainted with all the deadliest methods of destroying fish. They learnt to wield the spear, though the law especially forbids them so to do. They learnt to build up cruives j and if any salmon escaped these twin dangers, the nets of some small proprietor higher up the river were warily set for him. They found that night-lines were infallible for catching trout; and there is, in consequence, scarcely a river in...« less