188 A BUNGLE AND A DILEMMA 



Noble Science ; lie cannot hold a good place in a twenty 

 minutes' burst over a grass country without some 

 degree of jeopardy. The big-game shooter takes not 

 only lucre in his hands when he fares forth, but his 

 life also; but the fly-fisher, if he does not leave his 

 luncheon behind, need expect nothing more untoward 

 than the loss of a good fish or a hole in his waders. 

 That, I suppose, is why his craft is known as the Con- 

 templative Man's Recreation. 



Once, and once only in the course of a long life, 

 whereof perhaps an undue proportion has been squan- 

 dered by the waterside, has anything approaching an 

 adventure befallen me in salmon-fishing. Even that 

 should be more correctly described as a dilemma which 

 might have developed into an adventure ; and whereas 

 it has already been described in an earlier volume of 

 these notes, 1 it needs no further notice here. Howbeit, 

 having been bidden to spin an angling yarn, I must 

 turn over my old fishing book, which is stuffed with 

 many pleasant memories. But it is a hard world, and 

 I am well aware that, notwithstanding half the Apostles, 

 including one of the Evangelists, were Galilean fisher- 

 folks, people have grown to listen to a fisherman's 

 stories with distrust that they are at no pains to dis- 

 guise. Wherefore, in choosing an episode for descrip- 

 tion, I feel that it may disarm scepticism if I take one 

 wherein the narrator played a part far short of heroic. 

 At all events, it may exempt me from the necessity of 

 begging the reader to accept the story as an unvar- 

 nished record of fact. 



1 Memories of the Months, Third Series, pp. 91-94. 



