valorous fishermen, am persuaded that it is next door to an impossibility 

 to be a chronic fisherman and not become a chronic hyperbolist (I use 

 this term out of my love for my fishermen friends, and my disinclina- 

 tion to use the more ordinary and direct word which differs in no slight- 

 est shade of meaning. I refer to the little radical among the words 

 which is pronounced liar). There must be some men of unimpaired 

 virtue (1 do not speak this in any haughty spirit). Truthfulness, like 

 persecuted goodness, must have some fortress to which to retreat ; and 

 in claiming to be an unsuccessful fisherman it occurs to me that it has 

 become apparent that I am this rocky fortress of incorrupted truth. 

 Fish and men, specially the fish, may depend on me, I absolutely re- 

 fuse to prevaricate unless it be entirely convenient. 



If I have been digging for morals when I should have been digging 

 bait and baiting my hook, I beg to suggest I have been decoyed to it 

 by the moralizing moods of the professional fisherman. He always acts 

 as if he fished from the same motive as he says his prayers, namely, 

 piety ; though I for my part think it a slimy trick to hide play under the 

 cloud of devotion. If men will fish let them not preach and attempt to 

 persuade others they are doing it as an act of religion. To be Shake- 

 spearean (a manner quite foreign to me), " Methinks they do profess too 

 much." I knew a truthful fisherman once (he is dead); and I feel 

 honor bound to prepare him an epitaph, though not at this time. But a 

 truthful fisherman has a right to pass into the list of heroes who over- 

 bore environment and gave the lie to centuries of precedent. 



I have some friends, good men and true at home and in business, 

 but who seem to cast from them all their fine ethical distinctions so 

 soon as they get a fish pole in their hands ; and when they have donned 

 fisherman's boots and have hold on a reel, then farewell, beautiful truth. 

 As soon as they smell fish their truthfulness evaporates, or at all events 

 disappears, and I think the most scientific explanation of its disappear- 

 ance is to ascribe it to evaporation which goes on so systematically on 

 the water, as is known to all students of meteorology. These friends of 

 mine fish in remote waters, where, because of the remote distances and 

 the lack of shipping facilities, the spoils can not be sent to admiring 

 friends. The fisherman is thought to be by nature a sociable biped, and 

 generous in delivering up his ill-gotten gains to those who sunburned 

 not neither baited a hook. But these good men and true must smother 

 their generous impulses. They are perforce reduced to the necessity of 

 eating their own catch, or giving most of it to aborigines who inhabit the 



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