374 Recreations of a Sportsman 



had " I told you so " painted on his face in lurid 

 tints, but it never got any nearer lucid expres- 

 sion than that, and perhaps it was as well, as 

 the man in the stern, the man with the rod, 

 was big, too big, in fact, to make any mistakes 

 with, and to give him credit, he was trying to 

 think of something religious, and as he told some 

 one long after, the only thing he could think of 

 were the words on the title-page of the first 

 edition of Walton's Compleat Angler, " Simon 

 Peter said, I go a-fishing, and they said, We 

 also go with thee," and then, what was more to 

 the point, from Thomas, " They fished all night 

 and caught nothing." 



Almost every angler has some peculiar man- 

 ner of meeting grief, but if the above was true, 

 this angler was a great philosopher of the an- 

 gling school and deserves a niche in history. 

 Few men have themselves in such awful, por- 

 tentous control. But our angler knew there 

 were as good fish in the sea, or Tahoe, and soon 

 was moving along the rocky indentations of the 

 lake shore, and again had a strike, this time a 

 smaller fish, a silver trout, that acclaimed it 

 with a thousand scintillations, that dashed into 

 the air as the fish seemed to skitter along 

 the surface; now darting downward, checked 

 by the little rod, rising to leap into the air, break- 

 ing the calm surface into a thousand rings of bril- 

 liant color in which the reflected snow seemed to 



