Barely half the time had elapsed when a huge head rose to the surface, and the bait was blown out, as it seemed, into the water, the head sinking with a swirl of water where it disappeared. On examining the rejected bait, which had naturally been seized crosswise, I found that it was pierced from head to tail with the teeth of the pike. I learned that the big fish was afterwards ignominiously taken with a net in one of these tributary brooks, so that its cunning was baffled at last. I also learned that the fish had repeatedly treated other anglers as it treated me, holding the bait for a short time in its mouth and then rejecting it. So it is clear that the water-vole will by no means be safe from the pike when it is the inhabitant of the brook instead of the river. Moreover, it does not need a very large pike to devour a full-grown water-vole. The pike can swallow an animal which seems quite disproportionate to its size. A young pike of barely five inches in length was seen swimming about with the tail of a gudgeon projecting from its mouth. The gudgeon was quite as long as its captor, and there is no doubt that if the fish had been let alone the pike would soon have digested the gudgeon sufficiently to swallow it entirely. The late Frank Buckland mentions that a pike weighing eight pounds was caught in the River Itchen. After it was taken out of the water it disgorged a trout of a pound weight. This must have been a sore disappointment for the captor, who would think himself defrauded of a pound weight in his angling record. The reader will remember that a heron and a cormorant lost their lives by capturing an eel which was too large for them, and it is a remarkable fact that a pike has been known to suffer a similar fate. It can easily be understood that an eel, twisting itself about convulsively in the struggle for life, should coil itself round a bird’s neck long enough to cause its death by strangulation; but it seems almost impossible that a pike, being a fish, and therefore breathing by gills, should be suffocated while in the water by an eel. Yet in the Fisheries Exhibition of 1883 there were two very remarkable stuffed groups, illustrating the voracity of the pike. In one of them a pike weighing ten pounds had attacked an eel weighing only one pound less. Now, an eel of nine pounds weight is a very large one, lithe, active, and muscular as a snake, and by no means a despicable antagonist. The pike had begun to swallow the eel, but the latter in its struggles forced its way out of the mouth through the gills, and thence into the water beneath the right gill-cover. But it could go no farther, the teeth of the pike having almost met through its body.