Il6 FLY-FISHING IN MAINE LAKES, 



with this silent though lifelike friend should come 

 thronging through my memory, and awake once 

 more the slumbering past? 



Faithful friend ! what wonder that these slender 

 joints should weaken with your last season's work, 

 fifty land-locked salmon, with their twenty times 

 fifty runs and leaps, captured with thy aid, in a 

 single day ! Is it not asking and expecting quite 

 too much from eight and a half ounces of split 

 bamboo ? 



"And did it accomplish such a feat?" I hear you 

 ask. 



It did ; and the memory of that day's sport, with 

 many others akin to it, has tempted me once more 

 to take up the pen, and, by the warm fireside, look 

 through the frosts and snows of January back to 

 the sunshine and showers of June. 



The locality of which I am about to write is no 

 new sportsman's elysium. The shores of " Grand 

 Lake Stream " had been trod, and its surface 

 paddled over, by the ardent fisher and his Indian 

 guide, long before the writer stumbled over his 

 A B C's ; and, if ever a shadow of discontent 

 flitted before me as I have cast my flies upon its 

 rushing waters, it was that I could not have visited 

 its sylvan shores before the hand of civilization had 

 shorn its surroundings of many of its beauties. 



