On Sunday the boys came home for their half-term holiday, so we strolled in the morning into the Devil’s Punchbowl. That is the name of the basin-shaped valley that lies behind the house — a deep circular glen, scooped out in a softer portion of the sandstone mass that forms the moor by rain and denudation. Thor owned it, I doubt not, long before it was claimed by its present possessor, for the parish is Thursley; and some Celtic god, whose name is only known to Professor Rhys, may have used it as his drinking-cup long before the Norseman brought his Thor, or the Saxon his Thunor, into the Surrey uplands. But the devil is now the heir-general and residuary legatee of all heathen gods deceased, be they late or early; he has come into titular ownership of their entire property. A steep path leads zigzag down the side of the escarpment into the bowl-shaped hollow; at its bottom a tiny stream oozes out in a spring as limpid as Bandusia. Water lies in the rock, indeed, at about two hundred and fifty feet below the surface of the moor, to which depth we have, accordingly, to sink our wells on the hilltop; and it is at about the same level that the springs gush forth which form the headwaters of our local rivers.
When we came upon the brook, as good luck would have it, a couple of farm labourers, in their workaday clothes, regardless of the Sabbath, lay at full length upon the bank, engaged in the picturesque, if not strictly legal, occupation of tickling trout. The boys were, of course, delighted; they had never seen the operation performed before, and were charmed at its almost mesmeric magic. At first the men, seeing gentlefolk approach, regarded us with disfavour, as their natural enemies, no doubt in league with the preserving landlord; but as soon as they discovered we were “the right sort,” in full sympathy with the fine old poaching proclivities of the upland population, they returned forthwith to their tickling with a zest, and landed a couple of trout, not to mention a crayfish, before the very eyes of the delighted schoolboys.
Tickling trout is an ancient and honourable form of sport, which admits of much skill and address in the tickler. The fish lurk quietly under overhanging banks, where an undermined green sod impends the tiny stream; and the operator passes his hand gently over their sides once or twice till he has established confidence; then, taking advantage of the friendship thus formed, he suddenly closes his hand and whips the astonished victim unawares out of the water. It has been urged by anglers (who are interested parties) that such conduct contains an element of treachery; but all is fair in love and war, of which last our contest with the wild creatures of nature is but a minor variety; and I cannot see that it matters much, ethically, whether you land your trout on the bank under pretence of titillating his sense of touch, or treacherously hook him by false show of supplying him with a dainty dinner. Indeed, all the trout I have interviewed on the subject are unanimously of opinion that, if you must be caught and eaten at all, they had rather be caught by a gentle pressure of the naked hand than have their mouths and feelings cruelly lacerated by a barbed hook disguised as a mayfly. Which reminds me of the charming French apologue of the farmer who called his turkeys together in order to ask them with what sauce they would prefer to be eaten. “Please, your Excellency,” said the turkeys, “we don’t want to be eaten at all.” “My friends,” said the farmer, “you wander from the question.”
It is curious, though, to see how this mere thread of water supports a whole isolated colony of its own, composed of many dozen kinds of fish, insects, and crustaceans, who know no more of other members of their race than the people on a small Pacific island knew of the human family before Captain Cook burst upon them from the blue, with the blessings of Christianity, rum, and extermination. These trout, for example, are a group apart; they are always small, even when adult, because there is little food for them, and the stream is little. In big rivers, where there is space to turn, and provisions are plentiful, a successful trout of the self-same species runs to five or six pounds, while the very near variety which frequents great lakes not infrequently grows to forty-five or fifty. But here, in this upland rill, an ounce or two is the limit. They live mostly in pairs, like well-conducted fish, one couple to each pool or overhung basin; yet, strange to say, if one is tickled or otherwise enticed away, the widowed survivor seems always to have found a mate before three hours are over. I know most of them personally, and love to watch their habits and manners. They are brilliantly speckled here, because the water is clear and the bottom pebbly; for the spots on trout depend on the bed, and come out brighter and more ornamental by far during the breeding season. This is still more conspicuously the case with the æsthetic stickleback, the dandy of the fresh waters; he puts on the most exquisite iridescent hues when he goes a-courting, and exhibits himself to his mate more gorgeously clad than Solomon in all his glory. Unfortunately, the colours are very fugacious, for they die away at once when he is taken out of the water; but while they last, they outshine in brilliancy the humming-bird or the butterfly. Both species are great and determined fighters, as always happens with brilliantly decorated birds, fishes, reptiles, and insects. None but the brave deserve the fair; and bravery and æsthetic taste seem to go together. Indeed, the courageous little trout will face and drive away a murderous pike who menaces his home, while stickleback will engage one another in such sanguinary fights for the possession of their mates that only the Kilkenny cats can be named in the same day with them.
The other inhabitants of the tiny brook are far more numerous than you would imagine. Miller’s-thumbs poke their big black heads out of holes in the clay bank at every quiet corner. Crayfish hide among the weeds or dart between the sedges. Stone-loach flit down stream like rapid shadows when you lift the bigger pebbles, under which they lie skulking. As for caddis-worms and water-spiders and the larvæ of dragon-flies, they are there by the hundred; while the full-blown insects — living flashes of light, as Tennyson calls them — poise their metallic blue bodies for a second over the ragged-robins that grow in the boggy hollows, and then dart away like lightning to the willow-herb in the distance. It is a world apart, this wee world of the streamlet; it has its own joys, its own fears, its own tragedies. The big solemn cows, with their placid great eyes, come down to drink at it unheeding, and blunder over the bank, and slide their cloven hoofs to the bottom through the clay, unaware that they have crushed a dozen maimed lives, and spread terror like an earthquake over fifty small fishes. But the trout and the loaches stand with tremulous fins beating the water meanwhile ten yards below, and aghast at the cataclysm that has altered for ever their native reach. Not for fully twenty minutes do they recover heart enough to sneak up stream once more to their ruined bank, and survey with strange eyes the havoc in their homesteads.