140 STRIPED BASS, 



and to place it in mahogany sawdust to dry. When 

 thus prepared it does not soak water, nor even sink. 



Fly-fishing for bass, however, is the perfection of 

 the sport, and infinitely surpasses in excitement all 

 other modes of killing these noble fish. The best 

 season on the Potomac is in July or August, and 

 the favorite hours the early morning or the twilight 

 of the evening. The ignorant and debased natives 

 "who inhabit the romantic region of hill and valley 

 in the neighborhood of Tenally Town, about five 

 miles northwest of Washington, and who, dead to 

 the beauties that nature has lavished around them, 

 and utterly unacquainted with scientific angling, 

 look merely to their two cents per pound for striped 

 bass, manufacture a fly by wdnding red or yellow 

 flannel round the shank of a large hook, adding 

 sometimes a few white feathers. They substitute 

 for rod a young cedar sapling, denuded of bark and 

 seasoned by age, and attaching to the upper end a 

 stout cord, fish with the large flannel swathed hook in 

 the rapids and below the falls of the Potomac, at 

 the old chain bridge, and without a reel, kill bass of 

 twenty or thirty pounds. 



No spot can be imagined more wild and roman- 

 tic, and with proper tackle, the reel, the lithe salmon 

 rod, and the artistic fly — no sport can be more excit- 

 ing. The roar of the angry flood, the bare precipices 

 topped with foUage on the opposite bank, the flat 

 dry bed of the stream where it flows during the 

 heavy freshets, but at other seasons a mass of bare 

 jagged rocks, and the dashing spray of the broken 



