16 TROUT LORE 



a generous bowl of native violets on the drawing- 

 room table. No, I am not going to attempt the 

 impossible and describe a trout garbed in nuptial 

 robes ; I leave that task for the poet and painter. 

 We who have angled much for the speckled 

 beauties have learned through experience to seek 

 them as the Open Season wanes well up towards 

 the headwaters of streams; indeed, even little, 

 unimportant confluents, possessed of scarce six 

 inches of water save in seldom pools, will turn 

 out pound fish and even better. To those un- 

 acquainted with the habits of this lover of the 

 rills the size of the fish sometimes taken from 

 the little creeks will be a matter of surprise. 

 Only last season, along toward the last days of 

 August, I was fishing in a certain famous trout 

 stream with but meager results; then one day 

 I made my way to a distant hay-marsh where I 

 knew a little spring creek found its source a 

 stream so small and unimportant as not to have 

 "honorable mention" upon the maps. One 

 could not much wonder that the map-makers had 

 missed the stream altogether; for rods at a time 

 it made its way beneath the ground, and when its 

 waters did smile up at the glaring sky it was 

 through an opening only a few inches wide. 

 Yet from that creek I took six fish, each the 



