240 LINES IN PLEASANT PLACES 



bunches, and no sign of a run of any other kind, were 

 enough ; you could not be always admiring the green 

 slopes and woodlands of maple and pine ; "^discussions of 

 local topography cannot be indefinitely prolonged. 



Thank the gods my good shipmate and travelling com- 

 panion A. was cheery to the backbone, as, in truth, a 

 good-looking fellow of fourteen stone, and with nothing 

 to do but travel about the world and enjoy himself, 

 ought to be. Being no angler, it was all the same to 

 him whether fish sulked or frolicked ; his patience was 

 as inexhaustible as his amiability, and when my ques- 

 tioning of Ben about fish and fishing ceased by force of 

 self-exhaustion, A. would quietly cut in with remi- 

 niscences of his recent run out to Colorado, former camp- 

 ings in the Rockies, adventures in Japan and all parts 

 of Europe, and personal acquaintance with the States 

 and the Dominion. The trouble that dear A. saved 

 me in looking after baggage and tickets, the reliance I 

 felt in his fighting weight and well set-up body, the 

 placid smile with which he took life whatever it might 

 be, were invaluable to me ; and, though he accepted 

 the ill-luck of our forenoon as only what he expected, 

 as being, indeed, the ordinary outcome of most fishing 

 expeditions, my chief desire was that he should have 

 the bliss of landing a good fish. For myself I was not 

 hopeful, and we went fishless ashore in the hot sun at 

 mid-day, glad to release ourselves from the cramped 

 positions in which we had been enduring the discom- 

 forts of that wretched skiff. 



In the afternoon we went out again. What would 

 I not have given for a boat really fit for the work a 

 steady, square-sterned craft, on the floor of which one 

 might have stood firm, casting right and left, and able 

 to take every advantage of those weeds which now 

 made trailing a positive nuisance ? Ben's theory was 



