2. Sheep’s-kidney suet, as much cheese, fine flower or manchet, make it into a paste; soften it with clarified honey.
3. Sheep’s blood, cheese, fine manchet, clarified honey; make all into a paste.
4. Sheep’s blood, saffron, and fine manchet; make all into a paste.
You may add to any paste, coculus-indiæ, assa-fœtida, oil of polipody of the oak, of lignum vitæ, of ivy, or the gum of ivy dissolved: I judge there is virtue in these oils, and gum especially, which I would add to all pastes I make, as also a little flax to keep the paste, that it wash not off the hook.
CHAP. VI.
TO KEEP YOUR BAITS.
1. Paste will keep very long, if you put virgin wax and clarified honey into it, and stick well on the hook, if you beat cotton wool, or flax into it, when you make your paste.
2. Put your worms into very good long moss, whether white, red, or green, matters not; wash it well, and cleanse it from all earth and filth, wring it very dry, then put your worms into an earthen pot, cover it close that they crawl not out; set it in a cool place in Summer, and in Winter in a warm place, that the frost kill them not; every third day in Summer change your moss, and once in the week in Winter; the longer you keep them before you use them the better: clean scouring your worms makes them clear, red, tough, and to live long on the hook, and to keep colour, and therefore more desireable to the fish: a little Bol Amoniac put to them, will much further your desire, and scour them in a short time: or you may put them all night in water, and they will scour themselves, which will weaken them; but a few hours in good moss will recover them. Lest your worms die, you may feed them with crumbs of bread and milk, or fine flour and milk, or the yolk of an egg, and sweet cream coagulated over the fire, given to them a little and often; sometimes also put to them earth cast out of a grave, the newer the grave the better; I mean the shorter time the party hath been buried, you will find the fish will exceedingly covet them after this earth, and here you may gather what gum that is, which J. D. in his Secrets of Angling, calls ‘Gum of Life.’
3. You must keep all other sorts of worms with the leaves of those trees and herbs on which they are bred, renewing the leaves often in a day, and put in fresh for the old ones: the boxes you keep them in must have a few small holes to let in air.
4. Keep gentles or maggots with dead flesh, beast’s livers, or suet; cleanse or scour them in meal, or bran, which is better; you may breed them by pricking a beast’s liver full of holes, hang it in the sun in Summer time; set an old course barrel, or small firkin, with clay and bran in it, into which they will drop, and cleanse themselves in it.