198 Recreations of a Sportsman 



fish and now I seemed to have come into my 

 own, as in a few moments I had a strike. I 

 felt the break of the thread, and away went 

 the line from the reel with the peculiar melody 

 that starts the angler's blood and sends it cours- 

 ing madly through his veins. It seems inane 

 to certain over-sane persons that anglers should 

 be so easily worked up by a hissing line, a bend- 

 ing rod, and a screaming click, but the angler 

 acknowledges the soft impeachment and is satis- 

 fied. Just what my sensations were with my 

 first salmon taking line, garnering it in feet, 

 yards, and fathoms until he had four hundred 

 feet, I could not describe and would not care to 

 try for the benefit of these same over-sane critics, 

 but at that particular moment there was not 

 money enough in Monterey Bay to have bought 

 the experience which, I doubt not, proved the case 

 of the critics. I know Bill was laughing at me, 

 and he wished to discuss it then and there. Bill 

 was not disputatious, but merely insistently 

 argumentative at the wrong time; and as the 

 fish took fifty feet more in a glorious burst of 

 speed and I sprang to my feet that I might 

 catch the glint of him against the blue waters of 

 the bay, he laughed softly and put his proposi- 

 tion. 



" Say, Colonel, did it ever occur to you that 

 fishin' is a curious thing? " 



My salmon was sulking now; he had plunged 



