CHAP. xx. Length of Lins. 285 



Consequently a fish does not usually take out all your line, and 

 expend all his strength in one rush. No one has told him that your 

 line is only so many yards in length, and that if he will only persevere, 

 he must come to the end of it, and break it ; on that subject his mind is 

 fortunately a blank, so he ordinarily confines himself to the limits of 

 the pool in which you have hooked him, and rushes up and down that ; 

 so that you lose and recover and re-use the same length of line many 

 times in the course of one fight. And if by any chance he does come 

 to the end of your line, the course is simple. I confess I once had a 

 fish take me so very near to the end of my 120 yards of line that I 

 kept anxiously watching the reel to see if it would hold out, and had 

 to make up my mind what I would do if it didn't. If something 

 must be broken, the choice is obvious, let it be the line, not the rod. 

 The course, then, is simple ; lower the top of your rod till it is in a 

 straight line with your line, till all the strain is taken off the rod, and 

 goes through the ring straight from the reel to the fish. There hold on, 

 but don't despair yet. Of course you then have on the very utmost 

 strain you can possibly put on, and it is death or victory. After running 

 out 120 yards of well-contested line, the odds are it will be victory; 

 you will turn him, and if he will only go in any direction but straight 

 away from you, you are saved. I hope I am not romancing, but citing 

 from the tables of real memory, I think I am, that either I or one of my 

 friends have thus been victors at the last tug. At any rate, I know 

 there's a firm conviction in my mind that the die-hards in life not 

 unfrequently live through it. But if the worst comes to the worst and 

 you are broken, it is pretty certain that the break will be in the snood 

 or trace most probably in the snood that has seen most wear. There 

 is also another view of the position, the unpractical perhaps, but the 

 romantic one. The existence, or idea of the existence, of a remote 

 possibility of a tug as a last hope, remote though the bare possibility be, 

 is just the little risk that adds spice to your sport. Sport reduced to a 

 certainty is sport robbed of its essence. H., whom I have quoted 

 elsewhere, was such a thorough sportsman that he would never keep a 

 head, however fine, that was not shot with what he called " the toy," 

 the other rifles, which were the usual weapons of ordinary mortals, were 

 never used by him, except at elephant and bison, and, in cases of 

 emergency, with bear, etc., but any deer shot unadvisedly with what he 

 was pleased to term scornfully a " blunderbuss " was a head to be given 



