Teaching a Community to Fly Fish—The Fish Hog 25 
many, I fear, it will abide unto the end. 
It is incomprehensible, the extent to 
which quantity to the exclusion of 
quality, is found in the make-up of the 
average individual. It is a hideous 
blot that will not out on the otherwise 
fair escutcheon of many an angler of 
recognized skill and national reputa- 
tion. 
Each season there are parties fishing 
the waters of Northern Michigan and 
Wisconsin who take bass, trout, mas- 
calonge and pike perch in such numbers, 
beyond the possibility of consumption, 
that hundreds of their catch have to be 
buried to make existence in camp tol- 
erable. The catch of these butchers is 
written up by some quantity-befogged 
correspondent and by the daily press, 
in many instances ably assisted by 
the sporting journals, and heralded 
throughout the land as brilliant achieve- 
ments in truesportmanship. And these 
same butchers have the supreme gall to 
pose asanglers. Their slaughtering in- 
stincts would barr them out of a Digger 
Indian camp. They do not possess the 
Eebees of true angling. There is 
not enough poetry, music. love of na- 
fire wand Mature’s, creations in the 
pinched-up souls of a dozen of these 
butchers, to make the ninth part of an 
angler. 
A hog is a hog, whether constructed 
with two or four legs, and you can no 
more make an angler out of the two- 
legged variety than you can make a 
silk purse out of an ear of the four- 
legged kind. In fishing for bass, 
whether fly or bait casting, it should be 
beneath the spirit and manliness of an 
angler to keep anything under a pound, 
unless so badly hooked as to make 
recovery extremely doubtful. 
I firmly believe that this little world 
we inhabit was so constructed that its 
w 
v 
internal machinery is so manipulated 
and run by the head engineer, that the 
angler who has lived and been actuated 
by this law of quality, rather than by 
that of quantity, will be found, when 
the last trumpet is sounded and all 
goes up in blue smoke, to have had the 
greatest number and most enjoyable 
outings; to have had the longest and 
most exciting battles, and to have 
brought to the gaff and net the biggest 
fish, and that to him will be assigned 
the best pools of the golden streams 
ime otie lands Or athe, Elercatter.) 
adopted the rule, years since, of return- 
ing to the water all bass under a pound, 
and I will go home empty handed, as I 
have done many and many a time, if I 
can’t take fish of a pound and upwards. 
I carried this rule with me to the Tippe- 
canoe, where, with our party, it has be- 
come as ‘‘the law of the Medes and 
Persians,” and he who does not keep it 
holy is shunned as a leper. 
Big Walnut, the fishing waters of 
this town, is not an ideal bass stream, 
but above the average for a stream of 
its size and volume of water. — It is fed 
by springs largely, but runs through a 
Section of country too, level to be a 
stream of much current. Like all In- 
diana streams—tributary or sub-tribu- 
tary to the Wabash and Ohio rivers—it 
contains bass, the small-mouth, so far 
as I have observed. If not an ideal fly- 
casting stream, it possesses many fea- 
tures tending to that end; it hasnumer- 
ous bouldered pools and riffles, and the 
caster who can get out sixty and 
seventy feet of line can cover all its 
pools, and, asarule, have a clear bat- 
tle-field. A number of three and four 
pound fish have been taken with the 
fly this season, and I would guess, from 
what little I have seen, that it can hold 
its own with many of the more preten- 
