OPENING DAY OF THE TKOUTTNG SEASON. 161 



in a condition of harmony never dreamed of by the care-worn 

 racer after the rusty dollar. 



Persons who have never practiced the angler's gentle art 

 can scarcely appreciate the feelings which well up in the 

 soul of an expert who has studied nature, the habits of trout, 

 and the devices necessary to present lures gracefully for their 

 acceptance. His fly-rod is twelve and a half feet in length, 

 including a telling-top of split bamboo. His reel is a narrow 

 click one, upon which is wound a braided line of silk and 

 hair, which tapers from the middle to each end, and is thirty 

 yards in length. A nine-feet-long casting-line is looped to the 

 end, and with the attractions of a cinnamon fly as a stretch- 

 er, a gray professor as the first drop, and a red ibis as the 

 hand-fly, he feels sure that the trout in the first pool will leap 

 for joy at his approach. As he walks over the meadows, sees 

 the birds, hears all nature waking into new life, his very step 

 upon the mead when the grass is beginning to shoot confers 

 a sense of velvety elasticity ; and as he nears the stream, sees 

 the cat-tails of the willows dip and play on the margin of the 

 ripple, and the trout rising and leaping after flies so that they 

 cast miniature rainbows over the stream, with cautious step 

 he approaches within casting distance of the pool. He makes 

 a cast, and a large trout meets his fly and fastens. For an in- 

 stant the angler is transfixed ! The old sensation of rapture 

 returns with the new spring, and as the circulation of his 

 blood quickens, he spontaneously ejaculates, " Well, this is 

 worth living for !" 



