92 FISHING WITH THE FLY. 



writers of this century lie will stand foremost, and 

 yet lie never wrote as fully as lie intended of the 

 fish that he told me had afforded him more pleas- 

 ure than any other. He had not revised his "Am- 

 erican Angler's Book" for some time before his 

 death, and so his remarks on Back's grayling must 

 stand as he wrote them before the era of the Michigan 

 grayling. He there says of the Arctic grayling : 

 " The grayling being a fish in the capture of which 

 the American angler cannot participate, we give no 

 account of the manner of angling for them, but re- 

 fer the reader who may have interest or curiosity on 

 that score to English authors." He intended to re- 

 vise that sentence and give his own experience, but the 

 Reaper judged him ripe for the harvest before he did 

 it. In my opinion he was one of those who should 

 never have been ripe for that harvest, and his loss to 

 our angling literature was a severe one. 



That the grayling will take bait, truth requires the 

 admission ; would that it were not so. I would prefer 

 that its food was the soaring insect, or even the float- 

 ing thistledown, with an occasional feather from an 

 angel's wing dropped in the moonlit flood ; but science 

 has laid bare its interior with the searching scalpel, and 

 the Caesarian operation has brought forth the lowly 

 caddis-worm and other larvae, and the bait-fisher has 

 taken advantage of the knowledge and pandered to the 

 baser appetite of the fish. 



That the grayling does not eat other fish is proved 



