I shall next tell you a winter-bait for a Roach, a Dace, or Chub; and it
is choicely good. About All-hallantide, and so till frost comes, when
you see men ploughing up heath ground, or sandy ground, or greenswards,
then follow the plough, and you shall find a white worm, as big as two
maggots, and it hath a red head: you may observe in what ground most
are, for there the crows will be very watchful and follow the plough
very close: it is all soft, and full of whitish guts; a worm that is, in
Norfolk and some other counties, called a grub; and is bred of the spawn
or eggs of a beetle, which she leaves in holes that she digs in the
ground under cow or horse dung, and there rests all winter, and in March
or April comes to be first a red and then a black beetle. Gather a
thousand or two of these, and put them, with a peck or two of their own
earth, into some tub or firkin, and cover and keep them so warm that the
frost or cold air, or winds, kill them not: these you may keep all
winter, and kill fish with them at any time; and if you put some of them
into a little earth and honey, a day before you use them, you will find
them an excellent bait for Bream, Carp, or indeed for almost any fish.
And after this manner you may also keep gentles all winter; which are a
good bait then, and much the better for being lively and tough. Or you
may breed and keep gentles thus: take a piece of beast's liver, and,
with a cross stick, hang it in some corner, over a pot or barrel half
full of dry clay; and as the gentles grow big, they will fall into the
barrel and scour themselves, and be always ready for use whensoever you
incline to fish; and these gentles may be thus created till after
Michaelmas. But if you desire to keep gentles to fish with all the year,
then get a dead cat, or a kite, and let it be flyblown; and when the
gentles begin to be alive and to stir, then bury it and them in soft
moist earth, but as free from frost as you can; and these you may dig up
at any time when you intend to use them: these will last till March, and
about that time turn to be flies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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