If it be said, that this is not a pleasure, it is all care and pains,
especially to him that is the master, who must be perpetually vexed at
the negligence and blockishness of servants, that will never perform
what he expects and orders: I answer, that is a good reason for leaving
the world. The plague of servants is the same in all business, wherein
you use and depend upon them; therefore, to be rid of it, give away
your estate, retire, and be an hermit: and even then you shall find the
gnawing of your own mind a more perverse evil, than all the business,
servants, with the crosses and vexations attending them. We were not
made perfect, but must live in perpetual disease; the only point is,
which way to lessen it; and that must be by employment, which diverts the
sense of our innate misery. What can be a greater torture, than to live
chained to a bed, though the best in the world, and have no company nor
business? Therefore court business, if you would pass for an epicurean,
and let it be such as brings comfort to nature, and not pain and torment
in the consequence; that is to say, lawful, profitable, obliging, and
temperate. So you avoid offending the publick, increase your store, win
your friends and family, and preserve your health; all which, I take it,
are accomplished, in great measure, by the mastery of fish.
Now, as to the vending of fish, observe that it is best to be content
with the market price, as you can find it, as most are for other vendible
commodities; and for carps between thirteen or fourteen, or sixteen
inches, measuring from nose-end to tail-end, twelve pence is a good
price; selling to the nobility or gentry, may produce one penny more, and
may measure up to seventeen; but never promise above twenty turned of
sixteen in twelve score.
_Of Benefits, besides the main Design._
These are many, and not inconsiderable; as first, when you make a great
water, you take the first spit of the ground upon which the bank is to
stand, and from the pan of the pond. In case you take earth there for the
bank, and this you carry to some place where it is most easily removed
upon your tillage-ground, and there let it lie to rot the sod, and then
there is not a better manure, and more than pays the charge of digging
and carrying it.
2. You gain the making of stews, and, it may be, other ponds for the
convenience of your cattle, all under one charge: for if you must dig
clay and earth for your bank, it is as easily taken where it doth this,
as otherwise.
3. If the soil about the waters be any thing moorish, it may be planted
with osiers, which yield a certain yearly crop.
4. The feed of the pond when laid dry, or the corn, that is, oats, which
you may have upon the bottom, though mere mud, is very considerable. This
hath been touched before.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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