WINTER TALKS ON SUMMER PASTIMES. 11 



nature. As a merchant he is sedate, reticent and absorbed. 

 As an angler he is cheerful, voluble and merry hearted. 

 Ten words suffice him to sell a hogshead of sugar, but he 

 will talk an hour on the felicity of striking, fighting and 

 killing a five-pound bass. I once asked him the weight of 

 the largest fish he ever caught. His response was : 



' 'I am not sure that I can answer your question. I caught 

 what 1 believe to have been my largest bass when we never 

 thought of weighing them. In my early days, when I fished 

 with a hooppole and corresponding appendages, this thing 

 happened to me : A rough dock extended a few feet out 

 into the river in front of my father's farm. It was placed 

 at a point in the river where the current flowed with mod- 

 erate rapidity over a pebbly bottom. It was not merely just 

 the kind of water bass take to in October, but its attractive 

 qualities were augmented by the moss-covered logs which 

 constituted the base of the rickety old dock from which I 

 was wont to angle. On one memorable occasion I could 

 not have passed my tenth year my hook was seized by the 

 largest fish I had ever seen of the bass family. My line was 

 not more than twelve feet in length, and it took my lusty 

 visitor but an instant to run off with the slack and force the 

 barb clean through his ponderous jaw. The result was a 

 leap that made my hair stand on end, and brought me to my 

 feet quicker than you could say 'Jack Robinson.' My first 

 impulse was of course to 'j ank' him, but I might as well 

 have tried to 'yank' the dock itself from its moorings. Find- 

 ing him bent on mischief, and foreseeing a long fight, I fol- 

 lowed his lead and managed to get on the pebbly beach 

 where I hoped to be able to take him out of the net. But, 

 do my best I could not manage it by any of the processes 

 with which I was familiar, and finding myself dragged 

 toward a slough in which I would have been incontinently 

 swamped if I had attempted to cross it, in sheer despair I 

 made a bee line for the bushes, and very un artistically but 

 very surely ran him ashore the largest bass, by the common 

 verdict, ever known to have been caught in those waters. 

 I have since landed hundreds of large fish, scores of them 



