16 TROUT FISHING. 



on the line. Fill a glass bottle with the common 

 blue-bottle fly found on fresh horse or cow dung- 

 Bait your hook with two of these flies, and let it sink 

 nearly to the bottom. In this way you may catch 

 trout in ponds, or deep waters deposited by running 

 streams, and often in the slack water of mill dams, 

 when you could not catch them in the stream itself. 

 This kind of trout fishing is practiced in July and 

 August. When the fish has taken the bait, play him 

 towards the top of the water always. Do not let 

 him tangle your line in the weeds or under-brush. 



The fin of a trout, or other small fish, is sometimes 

 used as a bait for trout with good success. It is 

 dropped and roved, as with a minnow or fly. 



Brook trouting is the very poetry of angling. It 

 is an intellectual amusement, too, and requires as 

 much caution, calculation, and prescience as a game 

 of chess as fine touches of art as are necessary to 

 perfect a picture or a statue. Through the meadow, 

 where the rivulet, scarce a stride across, glides si- 

 lently through the grass ; along the gravelly bottom, 

 where it sings and gurgles among the pebbles; 

 through the gaps between the stony ridges, where 

 it chafes and dances and raises its tiny roar among 

 the splintered rocks; and across the woods, where it 

 turns, and doubles, and feigns to sleep in quiet pools, 

 the trouter must pursue 



" The noiteless tenor of bin way." 



In every promising noolr, on every inviting eddy, 

 at the foot of every mimic tataract in fact, in every 



