256 FISHING WITH THE FLY. 



make one envy the trout ; and an occasional spring 

 dripping with a fresh rat-tat-tat oyer rocks and moss 

 and into one's whiskey in syjite of all one can do. This 

 sort of thing is what makes a trout-stream after all. 

 You may catch a whale in a goose-pond but it isn't 

 angling. To me much depends upon surroundings. I 

 like to form a picturesque part of a picturesque whole. 

 Even when there is no audience in the gallery. 



" Given, a dark glen fringed with pines that sigh and 

 pine high up aloft — a pool whose sweep is deep, around 

 which rocks in tiers, mossy as tombstones centuries 

 old, bow their heads in mourning — heads crowned 

 with weeds, and grave-mounds of mother earth, and 

 pallid flowers, pale plants and sapless vines that struggle 

 through shadows of a day in coma, laid in the hearse 

 of night, without a proper permit, and I am happy. I 

 don't know just why, but if I meet an undertaker I 

 mean to ask him. All these deep, dark hiding spots of 

 nature seem but so many foils to the keen sense of 

 life and thrills of vitality that fill me. My nervous 

 system sparkles against such sombre back-grounds. 



"Then, too, the Fall was lovely. Next to Niagara, 

 the Kauterskill and Adams', this Buckhill Fall is one 

 of the most successful, in a small way, that I know of. 

 It might be bigger and higher and have twenty-five cents 

 worth more water coming over it out of a dam ; but for 

 a mere casual Fall gotten up inadvertently by nature, it 

 is very good, in an amateurish sort of away, you know! 



" There is, I believe (hang it, there alivays is !) a ro- 



