46 FISHES. 



an apprehensive brain, delicacy in the senses of 

 touch and hearing, activity of limb,, physical 

 endurance, persevering control over impatience, 

 vigilant watchfumess, are qualifications necessary 

 to form the fly-fisher. His amusing and chance- 

 ful struggles, teeming with varying excitement, 

 are with the strongest, the most active, the most 

 courageous, the most beautiful, and the most 

 valuable of river fish ; and his instruments of 

 victory are formed of materials so slight, and 

 some of them so frail, — they are beautiful as well, 

 — that all the delicacy and cunning resources of 

 art, are requisite to enable feebleness to over- 

 come force. The large, vigorous, nervous Salmon, 

 of amazing strength and wonderful agility ; the 

 rapid Trout, of darting velocity, hardy, active, 

 untiring — whose dying flurry shows almost in- 

 domitable resistance — are hooked, held in, 

 wearied out, by the skilful and delicate manage- 

 ment of tackle that would, if rudely handled, be 

 bent and strained by the strength and weight of 

 a Minnow. 'Tis wonderful to see hooks of Lilli- 

 putian dimensions, gut finer than hair, and a rod, 

 some of whose wooden joints are little thicker 

 than a crow's quill, employed in the capture of 

 the very strongest of river fish. The marvel lies 

 in the triumph of art over brute force. If the 

 sporting gear of the fly-fisher were not managed 

 with art, on the mathematical principles of 

 leverage, he could not, by its means, lift from the 

 ground more than a minute fraction of the dead 

 weight of that living, bounding, rushing fish, 

 which he tires to death, nay drowns, in its own 

 element. The overcoming of difliculties by the 

 suaviter in modo forms one of the greatest charms 



