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It was in the peculiar disposition of the Petrick family that the satisfaction which ultimately settled in Timothy's breast found nourishment. The Petricks had adored the nobility, and plucked them at the same time. That excellent man Izaak Walton's feelings about fish were much akin to those of old Timothy Petrick, and of his descendants in a lesser degree, concerning the landed aristocracy.

Izaak Walton, speaking of George Herbert's mother, says she governed her family with judicious care, not rigidly nor sourly, "but with such a sweetness and compliance with the recreations and pleasures of youth, as did incline them to spend much of their time in her company, which was to her great content."

One's father is commonly of tougher fibre than one's mother, and one would not feel the same scruples, perhaps, in using him professionally as material in a novel; still, while you are employing him as bait, you see I am honest and plain-spoken, for your characters are baits to catch readers with, I would follow kind Izaak Walton's humane counsel about the frog you are fastening to your fish-hook: fix him artistically, as he directs, but in so doing I use him as though you loved him.

So Appleboy and Tunnygate had swum into each other's spheres of influence, either blown by the dallying winds of chance or drawn by some mysterious animal magnetism, and, being both addicted to the delights of the soporific sport sanctified by Izaak Walton, had raised unto themselves portable temples upon the shores of Long Island Sound in that part of the geographical limits of the Greater City known as Throggs Neck.

In the North "creeper-fishing" is akin to this method, but the creeper is the larva of the stone-fly, not a fly itself, and it is cast more like an ordinary fly and allowed to sink. Sometimes, however, the mature insect is used with equally good results. A few anglers still practise the old style of dapping or "dibbling" after the manner advised by Izaak Walton.

Into that stream he must cast his net and draw fish for his further sustenance and need. Good Izaak Walton had not the half of his self-reliance and bait-lore. A joyful party of four two women and two men fell upon him with cries of delight. There was a dinner party on where had he been for a fortnight past? what luck to thus run upon him!

About sixteen miles south-west of Selborne is the chief city of Hampshire and one of the great historical cities of the realm Winchester built on the side of a chalk-hill rising from the valley of the Itchen, a stream that was Izaak Walton's favorite fishing-ground. This was the Roman Venta Belgarum, and was made an episcopal see in the seventh century.

"How calm and quiet a delight Is it, alone, To read and meditate and write, By none offended, and offending none. To walk, ride, sit or sleep at one's own ease, And, pleasing a man's self, none other to displease." Charles Cotton, a friend of Izaak Walton, 1650

The river runs between steep hills fringed with ash and oak and hawthorn, and Dovedale can be pursued for miles with interest. One of its famous resorts is the old and comfortable Izaak Walton Inn, sacred to anglers.

"Oh, yes, Jack Young send him up." The colonel closed the book with a sigh of regret. "No use trying to read Izaak now," he murmured. "It would be a sacrilege. I'll have to wait a bit. Wonder what Jack wants. Ah, come in!" he called, as a discreet knock sounded on the half-opened door. "Trouble?" "Not yet, Colonel, though there may be. Do you want me to follow King out of town?" "Of course.