A Wonderful Story of a Mackerel

The angler is a mighty spinner of yarns, but no sooner does he set
about the telling than I, knowing him of old, and accounting him not an
uncommon but an unconscionable liar, begin (as Bacon hath it) "to droop
and languish." Nor does the languishing end with the story if I am
compelled to sit it out, for in that state I continue for some hours
after. But oh! the difference when someone who is not an angler relates
a fishing adventure! A plain truthful man who never dined at an
anglers' club, nor knows that he who catches, or tries to catch a fish,
must tell you something to astonish and fill you with envy and
admiration. To a person of this description I am all attention, and
however prosaic and even dull the narrative may be, it fills me with
delight, and sends me happy to bed and (still chuckling) to a
refreshing sleep.

Accordingly, when one of the "commercials" in the coffee-room of the
Plymouth Hotel began to tell a wonderful story of a mackerel he once
caught a very long time back, I immediately put down my pen so as to
listen with all my ears. For he was about the last person one would
have thought of associating with fish-catching--an exceedingly towny-
looking person indeed, one who from his conversation appeared to know
nothing outside of his business. He was past middle age--oldish-looking
for a traveller--his iron-grey hair brushed well up to hide the
baldness on top, disclosing a pair of large ears which stood out like
handles; a hatchet face with parchment skin, antique side whiskers, and
gold-rimmed glasses on his large beaky nose. He wore the whitest linen
and blackest, glossiest broadcloth, a big black cravat, diamond stud in
his shirt-front in the old fashion, and a heavy gold chain with a spade
guinea attached. His get-up and general appearance, though ancient, or
at all events mid-Victorian, proclaimed him a person of considerable
importance in his vocation.

He had, he told us at starting, a very good customer at Bristol,
perhaps the best he ever had, at any rate the one who had stuck longest
to him, since what he was telling us happened about the year 1870. He
went to Bristol expressly to see this man, expecting to get a good
order from him, but when he arrived and saw the wife, and asked for her
husband, she replied that he was away on his holiday with the two
little boys. It was a great disappointment, for, of course, he couldn't
get an order from her. Confound the woman! she was always against him;
what she would have liked was to have half a dozen travellers dangling
about her, so as to pit one against another and distribute the orders
among them just as flirty females distribute their smiles, instead of
putting trust in one.

Where had her