SPIRIT OF THE CHASE 23 



day. To-day, therefore, sees you by the river. 

 Urgent work has to be done? Yes; but what 

 a good morning is this ! The weather is quite 

 unusually auspicious. That idea about work must 

 have come from the nerves. Why hurry ? There's 

 time for duty and a little sport as well. The work 

 will be all the better for a few hours 1 freshening of 

 the mind in the open air. That day also is spent 

 upon the water. So the days, the weeks, even the 

 months, wear on. Had one good luck yesterday, or 

 last week ? That gives hope for better. Has one 

 had no luck for a time? There could not be a 

 clearer reason for expecting a little now. In the 

 neighbourhood of a salmon river prudential con- 

 siderations, the very best of work-a-day resolves, 

 vanish as summer mists at sunrise. When the 

 season is over the landscape is not quite what it was. 

 It will not be so witching again until the spring. 

 This, when you reflect, is singular. One cannot 

 think of any other pursuit, either in business or in 

 pleasure, that holds the mind so keenly and so 

 constantly. This is the more striking inasmuch as 

 other sports have adventitious attractions that are 

 absent from salmon fishing. The joys of other sports 

 are largely social. A man does not often go shoot- 

 ing by himself: nearly always he is one of a party. 

 Who for more than once in a way would go alone to 

 hunt the fox ? Sports and pastimes of the ordinary 

 kind are of an illusory nature. Much of the pleasure 

 attending them arises from something other than 

 themselves. It comes of the social instinct. Pan 



