18 SALMONIDiE. 



him hooked, we pulled him out vi et armis. No time for 

 grace or parley. It was purely a test of strength between 

 tackle and gills. We did not understand " playing a trout." 

 And yet we were the best anglers in the Tillage. No boys 

 could hold a candle to us. We caught bigger fish and more 

 of them. We knew every good place in the stream. There 

 was the old log just at the edge of the woods, the big hole 

 where we used to bathe, the bridge that crossed the road, tlie 

 rocky ledge at the pond where there was a little mill, the 

 crossing-log in the ten-acre pasture, the eddy at the lower 

 falls, and so on from point to point, through devious wind- 

 ings and turnings, away down stream three miles or more to 

 the grist-mill — the same which the old " Mountain Miller " 

 used to " tend " in days gone by. 



Ah ! those were halcyon days. No railroads disturbed the 

 quiet seclusion of that mountain nook. The scream of the 

 locomotive was not heard within twenty-four miles of it. 

 Twice a week an old-fashioned coach dragged heavily up the 

 hill into the hamlet and halted in front of the house which 

 was at once post-office, tavern, and miscellaneous store — an 

 " omnium gathenim," as our friend Ives had it in our college 

 days at Yale. One day it brought a passenger. A well-knit, 

 wiry frame he had, and features stolid and denoting energy 

 and kindred quaUties. He carried a leather hand-bag and a 

 handful of rods in a case. The village quidnuncs said he 

 was a surveyor. He allowed he Avas from Troy and had 

 " come to go a-fishing." From that stranger I took my first 

 lesson in fly-fishing. 



As he stood upon the tavern-steps he gazed across the bar- 

 ren waste of ground to the meeting-house opposite — the same 

 meeting-house where my revered grandfather ministered with 

 grace for forty years — a meeting-house quaint and ancient, 

 rooster-crowned, with its horse-block and horse-sheds at 

 hand, and its square pews inside, its lofty galleries and pul- 

 pit, its deacon-seats and its soiinding-board, long since things 

 of the past. He gazed and seemed to meditatCj. then shook 



