After the eloquent pleading for angling with which the treatise opens, the lady at once proceeds to teach the making of the “harnays” of it. The rod she orders to be constructed somewhat resembles, save in its larger size, the modern walking-stick rod. A hazel wand, or failing it, one of willow or mountain ash, is to be procured, as thick as the arm and nine feet in length. This is to form the butt, and is to be hollowed out by means of divers red-hot irons into a tapering hole, which is to receive the “croppe,” or top, as we now call it, when not in use. This “croppe” is to be made of a yard of hazel, joined to a length of blackthorn, crab, medlar, or “jenypre.” All these are to be cut between Michaelmas and Candlemas, the lady giving very particular directions as to their drying and the like. When the two portions of the “crop” are “fretted together,” the whole rod is to be shaved into a shapely taper form; the staff encircled with long hoops of iron or latten at both ends, and finished with a “pyke in the nether ende fastnyd wyth a rennynge vyce : to take in & oute youre croppe.” The line is then to be wound round the crop and tied fast with a bow at the top. The reader will note that there is no mention of a reel; it was only used, seemingly until the beginning of this century, for large salmon and pike. An angler who hooked a fish when armed with this ponderous rod (which must from its description have been nearly eighteen feet long, as large as a modern salmon rod), would act as Izaak Walton would have done in the like predicament,—throw the rod in to the fish and recover it when he could. But the lady is wonderfully pleased with this mighty rod, and thus concludes—“Thus shall ye make you a rodde soo preuy that ye maye walke therwyth : and there shall noo man wyte where abowte ye goo. It woll be lyghte & full nymbyll to fysshe wyth at your luste. And for the more redynesse loo here a fygure,” and she adds the curious woodcut which the reader may see reproduced at page 5.