What is the summary of the seventeenth chapter of Three Men in a Boat?

Chapter XVII of Three Men in a Boat has two major subjects. The opening paragraphs are about washing clothes. The men try to wash their clothes in the river water, but the garments end up being covered with dirt and filth from the Thames itself. They pay a washerwoman to fix the damage and to do a better job, instead.

For the rest of the chapter, the narrator talks about the sport of fishing. He...

Chapter XVII of Three Men in a Boat has two major subjects. The opening paragraphs are about washing clothes. The men try to wash their clothes in the river water, but the garments end up being covered with dirt and filth from the Thames itself. They pay a washerwoman to fix the damage and to do a better job, instead.

For the rest of the chapter, the narrator talks about the sport of fishing. He doesn’t believe that most fishermen catch many fish at all. He offers two examples of the kind of exaggeration that fishermen are known for. His first story is about a man who embellishes the number of fish that he catches. Eventually the man decides to add the number ten to whatever the real number of catches is. The narrator goes so far as to exaggerate himself by saying that the Committee of the Thames Anglers’ Association is considering adopting this standard.

The final tale is about a large mounted trout that the narrator and George see in a glass display case in a village inn. When they ask about the fish, four different men tell them four different stories about how each one of them caught the fish. This is impossible. At least three of them are exaggerating. George is curious enough to try to get a closer look at the fish. He falls, and so does the glass case and the trout. The fish breaks into hundreds of pieces. A real stuffed trout would not have broken open. This one turns out to be fake, after all. They—and we—realize that all of the fishermen had lied.