Chapt. win. Ltngth of Bumming Lint. 229 



the shallow, or the run, in search of food, and only aims at return- 

 ing to it ; or, perhaps, he has nol Left it. and it La there you hooked 

 him, and he has do definite ideas of where to go ; he just wants to 

 make a short rush to shake off the restraint, the thing that is holding 



him, and then he will return to his home. 



Consequently a fish dues not usually take out all your line, 

 and expend all his strength, in one rush X" one lias told him 

 that your line is only so many yards in length, and that it' he will 

 only | re, he must come to the end of it. and break it; on 



that subject his mind is a blank, so he ordinarily confines himself 

 to the limits of tlie pool in which you have hooked him, and 

 rushes up and down that ; so that you lose and recover and re-use 

 the same length of line many limes in the course of one tight. 

 And if by any chance he does come to the end of your line, the 

 course is simple. I confess I once had a fish take me so very 

 near the end of my 120 yards of line that I kept anxiously 

 watching the reel to see if it would hold out, and had to make ap 

 my mind what I would do if it didn't. If something must be 

 broken, the choice is obvious, let it be the line, not the rod. The 

 course, then, is simple ; lower the top of your rod till it is in a 

 straight line with your line, till all the strain is taken off the rod, 

 and goes through the ring straight from the reel to the fish. There 

 hold on, but don't despair yet. Of course you then have on the 

 very utmost strain you can possibly put on, and it is death or 

 victory. After running out 120 yards of well contested line, the 

 odds are it will be victory; you will turn him, and if he will only 

 go in any direction but straight away from you you ale saved I 

 hope I am not romancing, but citing from the tables of real 

 memory, I think 1 am, that either 1 or one of my friends have 

 thus been victors at the last tug. At any rate, I know there's 

 a firm conviction in my mind that the die-hards in life not 

 unfreiiuently live through it. But if the worst comes to the 



t, and you are broken, it is pretty certain that the break will 

 be in the snood or trace — most probably in the snood that has geen 

 most wear. There is also another view of the position, the 

 unpractical perhaps, but the romantic one. The e, or 



idea of the existence, of a remote possibility of a tug as a last hope, 

 remote though thi ! rabihty be, is just the little risk thai 



spice to your sport. Sport reduced to a certainty is sport robbed ol 



