Boys' Fish and Boys' Fishing 241 



live-box all the day long, and was continued on the next, 

 until he had brought to creel over three hundred. 



" I have always associated in my mind the crappie and 

 the love of ease and quiet of our old French inhabitants. 

 Nothing could more truly represent contentment and ease 

 than the picture of this simple-minded old gentleman on his 

 annual crappie-fish, at King's Lake." 



One of the authors of the present volume knew of an old 

 fellow in Plumas County, California, who, being blind, was 

 led every day to a little bay on Feather River, where he 

 would sit and fish the entire day. After a time the 

 house cat, being inordinately fond of fish, discovered the 

 object of the blind man's daily trip, and as he would unhook 

 a little trout or a " sucker " and lay it down beside him, she 

 would seize it and carry it up to the house, much to the 

 delight of the summer boarders, who watched the cat, and 

 the amazement of the blind angler. 



And these chubs form no small part of the day's record. 

 There is the horned dace, with steel-blue back and crimson 

 fins. There is the horny head, an old standby anywhere, 

 but most to be counted on in Kentucky. There is the chub 

 of chubs, with the horns on the head of the breeding males, 

 a nuptial ornament that is anything but pretty on a fish. 

 There is the fallfish, largest of all the eastern chubs, that 

 builds its nests of stones in the swift waters of the north- 

 east, and is really a noble fish for all its lowly origin. " It 

 is a soft fish," Thoreau tells us, " and tastes like brown 

 paper salted." For all that, it is a fish, and a fish of the 

 swift waters — one of the things worth while. The present 

 writer has taken one with a fly in the St. Lawrence, and ex- 

 amined nests which must have weighed half a ton. 



Perhaps the most surprised of all boys in the world was 

 one, not a country boy, but a city production from San Fran- 

 cisco, who one summer went up to visit his uncle at Clear 

 Lake, California. The first thing he asked was, " Are the 

 fish biting?" "Just tol'able," replied the old gentleman; 



