AUGUST 133 



fishing as a recreation should, during the weary three 

 months of the close season, try their hands at the clever, 

 shy old carp, of which they all have knowledge. 



ON THE CHESS. AUGUST HTH, 1897. 



SOME are in Ireland ; some in Norway ; others are doing 

 a little sea fishing ; meanwhile we wretched toilers are 

 frying in London in August London where the glare, 

 heat, and bustle of the city seems to me, as I step 

 out of my office building into the street, like the opening 

 of a furnace door. 



Racing hither and thither to keep appointments, and 

 close, careful consideration of momentous interests, 

 combine together to produce that condition of things 

 known as a nervous headache ; so, at five o'clock, I 

 determine not only to do no more work, but also to spend 

 my evening by the river. In the course of some years' 

 practice of an anxious and arduous profession, I have 

 frequently heard the merits of the shady hammock and 

 the quiet pipe extolled as nerve sedatives From 

 practical experience, however, I prefer fishing. Not that 

 I mean standing up to one's waist in a racing torrent, 

 playing an 181b. salmon, or anything so exciting. No, 

 the quiet hours on a dry-fly water, or an autumn day's 

 reaching are to me and, indeed, to most busy town 

 dwellers the most restful and soul-satisfying of all holi- 

 days. The nerves, kept at concert pitch, the over-weary 

 brain that bustles about at the hour of dawn and refuses 

 to be rested, can be pacified only by a complete change 

 of scene and interest, such as we get in fishing. To the 

 dry-fly fisherman there is no possibility of thinking about 

 business and catching fish at one and the same time, and 

 we are all savages enough to forget nearly everything in 

 the pursuit of prey. See the clever cross-examining 

 counsel by the trout stream ; how he creeps and hides 

 till he gets within hooking distance of his piscine witness, 

 casting his apparently harmless fly over him, and 

 eventually bringing him to bank. What cares he for the 



