How To Cook Fish

"First catch your hare," the old cookery books used to say, and hence it is proper, in a treatise devoted entirely to the cooking of Unshelled Fish, to pay passing attention to the Catching, or what the Head of the House terms the Masculine Division of the Subject. As it is evident that the catching must, in every case precede the cooking-but not too far-the preface is the place to begin. Shell-fish are, comparatively, slow of movement, without guile, pitifully trusting, and very easily caught. Observe the difference between the chunk of mutton and four feet of string with which one goes crabbing, and the complicated hooks, rods, flies, and reels devoted to the capture of unshelled fish. An unshelled fish is lively and elusive past the power of words to portray, and in this, undoubtedly, lies its desirability. People will travel for two nights and a day to some spot 2 where all unshelled fish has once been seen, taking $59.99 worth of fishing tackle, "marked down from $60.00 for to-day only," rent a canoe, hire a guide at more than human life is worth in courts of law, and work with dogged patience from gray dawn till sunset. And for what? For one small bass which could have been bought at any trustworthy market for sixty-five cents, or, possibly, some poor little kitten-fish-offspring of a catfish-whose mother's milk is not yet dry upon its lips.