THE BLACK BASS AND THE TROUT 

 COMPARED 



IT were idle to tell the trouter whose heart 

 is forever pulsing with the memory of a fa- 

 vorite mountain brook, which babbled all day 

 to him with its musical echoes from out of 

 the old rocky channel-ways, singing through the 

 chords of the shouldering pines that cluster along 

 its banks it were idle to tell him that the bass is 

 a nobler and harder fighter than the trout. That 

 one isolated day, when, tempted by the urgency of 

 a bass-loving friend, he cast his fly upon the surface 

 of a hundred-acre lake and failed to get a rise, set- 

 tled the question forever in his mind, and " No 

 Micropterus for me " became the fiat of the moment 

 and the text of his future angling life. It is not 

 to be wondered at. He might as well have tried to 

 shoot salmon in trees as to attempt to lure the wary 

 black bass from the cool recesses of a lake fifty feet 

 in depth, with its bosom as glassy as an unscratched 

 mirror. 



Perhaps but even then it would have been an 

 exceptional triumph had he chanced to find the 



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