CLEAR WATERS 



thorough sportsman, who both in youth and middle 

 age was my frequent and of all others most delightful 

 companion by the riverside, had scarcely ever more 

 than half my basket, and he always worked very hard. 

 But where the mystery lay I really do not know, any 

 more than I do not know why certain men always catch 

 the most in any company. I have watched him again 

 and again without being much the wiser. It was 

 rather a sore point, I am sure, though in all the years 

 he never uttered a single word upon the subject, and 

 from some subconscious instinct neither did I, though 

 we were very intimate. It never affected his unfailing 

 cheerfulness by the water-side, though it was a frequent 

 source of mortification to myself. 



Moreover, he had two fairish trouting rivers, of 

 which he owned some four miles, under his very 

 windows. But he would often drive or even walk 

 long distances to fish other and wilder streams from 

 sheer love of the sport, and of a variety of scene and 

 water ; and I think some of these long April or May 

 days by streams unknown to fame that I spent with 

 him are among the most treasured of my angling 

 memories. A mutual and breezy friend of ours, who 

 was a super-excellent fisherman, but no respecter of 

 susceptibilities, used to tell him he killed his fish by 

 hitting them on the head with his fly and stunning 

 them. He didn't like this, and indeed it was purely 

 hyperbolic, for he threw quite a reasonable line, and 

 had the eye of a hawk for everything with wings or 

 legs. When I speak of our respective baskets, using 

 the ego merely as representing the average fisherman, 

 I am not quoting loosely from memory ; for my 

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