70 Recreations of a Sportsman 



to really appeal to you; and so you stop, and 

 find that Costar not only makes flies, but keeps 

 a little inn that is so near the River of Feathers 

 that if the inn had a veranda you could stand 

 on it, and cast one of the inn-keeper's flies nearly 

 to the other side, and the chances would be that 

 you would land a trout. 



As you enter the yard you notice a number 

 of creels and rods hanging on the side of an old 

 weather-beaten shed, and they are the bulky 

 baskets that are seen only on the Pacific coast, 

 built by some dreamer who had seen trout in 

 a nightmare. A little crowd surges out of the 

 inn to meet the coach, and inspect the new ar- 

 rival, and already recognizing the fact that your 

 creel is outclassed, you try to hide it, but fail. 

 An hour later, in the central room, you hear the 

 truth about the River of Feathers from a group 

 of sturdy, big-booted, gray-shirted anglers. They 

 pretend not to know what the creel is, and take 

 you over to the fly-maker's sanctum and show 

 you the Hall of Fame of the River of Feathers. 

 The walls are covered with rude but correct and 

 life-size paintings of trout made by the simple 

 means of placing the trout on paper, running a 

 pencil around him, and painting him in, with 

 colored chalk. What fish stories these walls 

 tell! There is the story of every notable catch 

 in the Big Meadows for the past decade; and 

 the size of these monsters, their massive pro- 



