A BOOK OF FISHING STORIES 



was hooked a little below the bridge. Quickly the boat was 

 backed by the experienced hands of my gillie, now a pilot, 

 into the shallows beside the G. W. R. line, and then began 

 a fight such as I can rarely recall with any fish, tarpon and 

 salmon included. The excitement derived from fighting a 

 fish is, after all, an equation of the strength of the fish to that 

 of the tackle ; and there was agreeable difficulty in keeping this 

 headstrong bass, which bent my sea-trout rod as if it had been 

 a reed, from going through those greenheart piles round which, 

 given only a little more liberty, it would promptly have wound 

 the fine line. In the end the rod won, but now, just as victory 

 seemed within my grasp, a new and awful problem presented 

 itself, for an immense mass of green seaweed, tons of which, 

 dislodged by the salmon nets, go floating up and down the river 

 with every summer tide, suddenly came in view fast to the line 

 twenty or thirty feet above where I judged the struggling fish 

 to be. What was to be done ? I tried tapping the butt of the 

 rod, as some folks do in the case of a sulking salmon ; but the 

 weed was not sulking, and my dot and dash message met with 

 no response. Nearer and nearer, as I reeled the bass closer to 

 the surface, the great clump of weed approached to the top ring. 

 I knew it would have been quite as hard to get it through that 

 as to coax a camel through the eye of a needle, and I was just 

 bracing myself for the only alternative left, that of stepping out 

 in the mud and backing slowly up the bank until, without further 

 use of the reel, the fish should come within reach of the net, 

 when the bass obligingly took charge of an embarrassing situa- 

 tion. Shaking its head, as a terrier might shake a rat, it so 



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