The Best of the Bass 129 



one of us till night and she never could hold any- 

 thing against a fellow for more than three minutes 

 and a half. 



For miles the land was level and the stream 

 lazy. In such a country there could be no swift 

 water, and this one dawdled along with almost no 

 perceptible current. Yet it was no mere trickle of 

 moisture, but a river full eighty yards broad and 

 twenty feet deep. A few miles lower down its banks 

 dwindled to nothingness, and the broadening waters 

 drowsed through marshy wastes suggestive of Lin- 

 colnshire fens in olden days. But above my start- 

 ing-point the land gradually rose higher and higher 

 till it formed cliffs of rich clay, twenty feet and more 

 high. The windings of the stream were so erratic 

 that in one stretch of sixty miles by an air line 

 the actual distance by water was one hundred and 

 twenty odd miles. Nearly every mile of water was 

 good fishing, but to a lazy cancer the upper reaches, 

 being more wooded, were more attractive. Every 

 one of the innumerable bends presented a picture 

 of a steep, tree-covered bank upon the one hand 

 and opposite a brushy flat of greater or less extent. 

 This was caused by ages of the cutting away of the 

 bank toward which the current happened to set, and 

 a corresponding deposit of silt and rubbish by the 

 slack water opposite. Such an apparent mystery 

 on a lazy stream was naturally explained by the 

 spring freshets. Then the water rose twelve, fifteen, 

 or twenty feet and went raging lakeward, jamming 

 miles of ice which uprooted hundreds of trees and 

 ploughed like a glacier into every opposing bank. 

 After the frost was out, the soft, undermined bank 



