A BOOK OF FISHING STORIES 



Boca Grande, which another pen describes elsewhere in these 

 pages, with those in quest of tarpon. There it was, in a warm 

 and sunny Florida summer, that I fished many days in company 

 with a gallant officer who had led his own regiment against the 

 Boers, and with others whom I had known at home. The 

 game was a mightier prize than the bass, but then some of us 

 had come five thousand miles to catch it, whereas the bass of 

 my summer evenings were all caught within a quarter of a 

 mile of my own door. Here, I think, is a contrast that illus- 

 trates, at any rate for the travelled angler, the two different 

 aspects of the joy of fishing : either catching new and strange 

 fishes after long and arduous journeying to their haunts, or 

 luring the best of those which, in sea or river, are our near 

 neighbours at home. 



To these two memories of bass in east and west I might 

 have added many others framed in very different settings : 

 dancing seas off the white cliffs of Margate, breathless moon- 

 light nights on the beach at Folkestone, twilight hours beside 

 the old bridge at Poole, long and patient sessions in my little 

 lugger moored fore and aft in the shadow of Cornish cliffs, 

 tidal races off the island that faces Tenby, and like struggles 

 with the swift inrush of the Mawddach where it runs beneath 

 the viaduct at Barmouth. Nor were the methods by which we 

 caught, or failed to catch, bass less varied than the scenes of 

 our activity ; but this is not a book of methods, and such hap- 

 hazard technical information as may be found in its pages has 

 been wrapped in the more palatable form of narrative. 



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