196 Recreations of a Sportsman 



boatmen, was a character. Whether he was a 

 physician or a D.D. or a Ph.D. I did not learn, 

 but he might have been either, as he talked 

 learnedly as he faced the stern, and rowed, by 

 pushing the boat along with powerful strokes. 

 I remember we discussed Darwin, and I listened 

 to a learned dissertation on Herbert Spencer's 

 theories while I watched the moving boats. 



After a while we joined a fleet of nondescript 

 craft and Bill tossed over a big murderous hand- 

 line which he hooked over his arm, slacking out 

 about fifty feet to locate the salmon and find 

 out how deep they were lying. Here was the 

 only disagreeable feature of the sport, the fish 

 were liable to lie deep. But it was a poor angler 

 who could not devise some method to offset this, 

 and this had been done for us by the dean of 



the fishing, Mr. . I had prejudices against 



the hand-line, in fact, had waged a successful 

 war against it with the Tuna Club at Santa 

 Catalina, but I fell from grace and took the line 

 from Bill just in time to have a strike and was 

 shortly playing a fine fish, which came to the 

 surface forty feet away and attempted to jump 

 as well as a fish could with a three-pound sinker, 

 and soon came in, a splendid silvery fellow which 

 weighed about twenty pounds. As we passed 

 the various boats they called out obligingly the 

 depth the fish were lying, and w r hen the cry, 

 " two fathoms," came, meaning that the last fish 



