Part 38

“The darkness had begun to gather, indeed it was so dark that I knew only by the instinct of habit where my flies fell upon the water, for I could not fairly see them. I had just made a cast across a little rock which protruded somewhat above the surface into a small pool behind, and was slowly drawing my line toward me, when I perceived a frog seated upon the rock, watching the proceedings with some apparent anxiety. Hardly had I made out his frogship in the gloaming, when pop! he went into the water. ‘Kerchung!’ At this instant I felt a strike and returned the compliment sharply, so as to set my hook well in and make sure of my trout. He was very game, and I was obliged to play him with a five and a half ounce rod for some time, but finally landed him in good form, only to discover that instead of a trout I had taken froggy on a black hackle fly, setting the hook firmly into the thin membrane which connects the two hind legs and just where the tail ought to be. This left him the fullest freedom of action and gave him so good a chance to fight me that I never suspected him of being anything less than a half-pounder. He must have jumped from the rock directly on to the fly trailing behind it and been thus hooked by my ‘strike.’ Mem. —This story is true as gospel, but better not tell it where you enjoy an exceptional reputation for veracity.

“July 19th. * * * Nothing has happened! Nothing ever does happen here. Delightful existence, free from events! I remember hearing Homer Martin once say that it was the height of his artistic ambition to paint a picture without objects. The confounded objects, he said, always would get wrong and destroy his best effects. How far this was intended to be a humorous paradox and how far the suggestion of an artistic ideal, I know not, but I surely somewhere have seen a painting—from whose brush I cannot say—which quite nearly fulfilled this strange condition. It represented an horizon, where met a cloudless, moonless, starless summer sky and a waveless, almost motionless sea—these and an atmosphere. The effect was that one could hardly perceive where the sea ceased and the sky began. I wonder if it would not be thus with a life quite devoid of events—would one be able to distinguish such from Heaven?

“The charm of it is that it leaves both the physical and intellectual in one to develop freely. When a cow, grazing in a woodland pasture, comes at noonday to the brook to drink and then calmly and not without a certain ungainly majesty of movement, crosses the deep pool and climbs the steep hank on the other side, by no apparent motive urged save of her own sweet will, she always looks refreshed and filled in some sort with the stolid bovine expression of great contentment. Mark how different it all is when the same cow crosses the same brook driven by the barefooted urchin with a gad and shrill cries and a possible small dog in the background. How wearily and breathlessly she wades, and with what distressful pan tings she climbs, and how unhappy and enduring and long-suffering she appears, as you watch her shuffle away down the cow-path homeward! It’s the Must that hurts. It’s the barefooted urchin Necessity with his infernal gad Ambition and his ugly little cur dog Want, always chasing and shouting after one, that makes it so tiresome to cross the stream.

“Then, too, as to the mind. Shall not one gain better intellectual growth when beyond the reach of the imperial ukase of daily custom which fixes the mind upon and chains the tongue to some leading event of the passing hour?

“In swift and endless succession come foul murders, robberies, revolutions, sickening disasters, nameless crimes, and all the long list of events, and are as so many manacles upon the mind.

“I hate Events. They bore me. All except taking a pound trout.

“Alas! what a rent these last words make in the balloon I have been inflating! Logic (another troublesome nuisance, evolved, probably, at Hunter’s Point) forces me from the clouds to earth and insists that I shall accept a trite aphorism: ‘Little events fill little minds; great events for big ones.’

“Then if I take refuge in the cowardly device of saying I don’t want a big mind, what becomes of my theory of intellectual development as the outgrowth of an eventless life!

“I decline to follow out more in detail this or any other line of argument. One can’t argue in the face of such an event as the thermometer in the nineties away up here in the mountains.

“This chance allusion to logic reminds me that I have recently heard from a dear old angling friend. He writes incidentally that since his return to his active professional duties he has made money enough to pay many times over the expenses of his recent two weeks’ fishing bout with me. I have written him that he might find it well to start at once upon another trip. I have no doubt there exists a certain correlation of forces whereby a week’s fishing, with its resultant increase of oxygenation, and rebuilding of gray tissue, accurately represents a certain amount of possible mental labor and thus, indirectly, a fixed sum of money.

“It is then alarming to think how abnormally rich a man might become if he fished all the time.”

If I have thus quoted somewhat at length vaporings of other days from my note book it has been only to suggest to others, whose angling experiences are and have been wider and more varied than my own, how readily they can organize a “preserve” for winter angling. Believe me, no event, no feeling, no passing observation of your surroundings can be too trivial to record, and each written line will, in years to come, suggest a page of pleasant memories when as “Nessmuk” says—

“The Winter streams are frozen

And the Nor’west winds are out.”

“Mr. Webster’s sport of angling has given him many opportunities for composition, his famous address on Bunker Hill having been mostly planned out on Marshpee Brook; and it is said that the following exclamation was first heard by a couple of huge trout immediately on their being transferred to his fishing-basket, as it subsequently was heard at Bunker Hill by many thousands of his fellow-citizens: ‘Venerable men! you have come down to us from a former generation. Heaven has bounteously lengthened out your lives that you might behold this joyous day.’”—Lan-man’s Life of Webster.

“How, I love fishing dearly. There is no sport like it for me, but there is a vast deal in fishing besides catching fish.”—H. H. Thompson.

13. The Triumph.

14. Alexandra.

15. Seth Green.

16. Jungle Cock.

17. Fitz-Maurice.

18. Caddis.

19. Davis.

“When fish are basking during the mid-day hours in the hot summer months, they are not always to be drawn to the surface. But the combination more suitable for this method is the dressing known as the ‘Alexandra Fly.’”—David Foster.

“The exertion of crossing the Atlantic for fly-fishing will be amply repaid the sportsman by the quantity and weight of the fish he will capture; for there the fish are not troubled with the fastidiousness of appetite which in Great Britain causes it always to be a source of doubt whether the water is in proper order, the wind in the east, or thunder overhead, either of which, or all combined, too frequently cause the most industrious to return, after a long and laborious day, with an empty basket.”—Parser Gilmore.

“Of all places, commend me, in the still of the evening, to the long placid pool, shallow on one side, with deeper water and an abrupt overhanging bank opposite. Where the sun has shone all day, and legions of ephemera sported in its declining rays; the bloom of the rye or clover scenting the air from the adjoining field! Now light a fresh pipe, and put on a pale Ginger Hackle for your tail-fly, and a little white-winged Coachman for your dropper. Then wade in cautiously—move like a shadow—don’t make a ripple. Cast, slowly, long, light; let your stretcher sink a little. There, he has taken the Ginger—lead him around gently to the shallow side as you reel him in, but don’t move from your position—let him tug awhile, put your net under him, break his neck, and slip him into your creel. Draw your line through the rings—cast again; another and another—keep on until you can see only the ripple made by your fly; or know when it falls, by the slight tremor it imparts through the whole line down to your hand—until the whip-poor-will begins his evening song, and the little water-frog tweets in the grass close by not till then is it time to go home.”—Thaddeus Norris.

“You may always know a large trout when feeding in the evening. He rises continuously, or at small intervals—in a still water almost always in the same place, and makes little noise—barely elevating his mouth to suck in the fly, and sometimes showing his back-fin and tail. A large circle spreads around him, but there are seldom any bubbles when he breaks the water, which usually indicates the coarser fish.”—Sir Humphry Davy.

“It is not difficult to learn how to cast; but it is difficult to learn not to snap the fins off at every throw.”—Charles Dudley Warner.