LINES IN PLEASANT PLACES 



house in the Maine woods which I have in my note- 

 book, I will back my selected half-dozen of our English, 

 Irish, and Scotch sea-trout and lake flies against the 

 best of the Orvis favourites. 



Philadelphia, which, from my all too passing and 

 superficial view of it, has the most English-looking 

 suburbs of any city I have seen, does not count for 

 much with the angler. There are some streams in 

 Pennsylvania which yield plenty of small trout, and 

 if you know the proper places, at the head waters and 

 elsewhere, the Delaware and Susquehannah rivers, 

 which, in crossing them, I was assured contained no 

 game fish at all, have very fair black bass streams, while 

 there are what we should rank as burn trout in most 

 of the tributaries tumbling down through the woods and 

 the mountains and hills. As for salmon, I may here re- 

 mark that I could only hear of one pool in the United 

 States where Salmo salar can be caught. There are 

 heaps of salmon on the Pacific slope, but they are not 

 salar, and not sportive in the rivers to the fly. This 

 pool is the watery fretwork of a dam where the tidal 

 portion of a fifty-mile length of river is ended, and the 

 salmon are therefore caught in brackish water always 

 with the fly. Seventy were taken there the previous 

 year. 



Washington the city still of magnificent distances, 

 though it is gradually filling in the blanks, and is looked 

 forward to as the coming city of the leisure and 

 pleasure classes, who shall live unpolluted by the rank 

 snobbery of New York fashion, the chicanery of Wall 

 Street, and the genius of the almighty dollar, which 

 rules in other cities Washington, I regret to find, is 

 no better for the angler than Philadelphia. But you 

 get bass fishing in the historic Potomac, and small trout 

 in the hill country of Maryland and Virginia. 



