GENERAL INFORMATION AND ADVICE. 225 



places ; the ferruls are of the cheap kind, light and nickel 

 plated; the joints do not line up well; one joint bends too 

 much for another; it is poorly wrapped; and other faults will 

 appear if we look far enough. Perhaps this rod has only 

 cost two dollars, but it is not cheap at that price. The idea 

 is that good work and good materials are bound to cost a 

 certain amount more than poor work and poor quality goods 

 The best, not necessarily the best finished, is always cheapest 

 in the long run, but the cheapest is never the best, either in 

 start or finish, and both start and finish are usually close 

 together. Now nobody hesitates to buy a repeating rifle for 

 hunting big game for a few weeks in the fall, paying say 

 fifteen or twenty dollars, perhaps more, for it. In addition he 

 has to frequently pay for a license for hunting, which i9 

 seldom required of resident anglers, and even non-residents 

 are not charged as much for a fishing license as for a license 

 to hunt big game. Yet he cheerfully pays this sum for his 

 little hunt each fall, sometimes only every second season, and 

 yet he hesitates to put fifteen or twenty dollars into a fishing 

 outfit that can be used on any available occasion during the 

 entire spring, summer, and fall, a fishing kit that will give you 

 more real sport and more for the money invested than any 

 big game hunting outfit. Again you will pay even more than 

 this for a shotgun, and don't expect to get a reasonably 

 satisfactory shotgun for much less than twenty dollars, yet 

 you hesitate to pay half that amount for a fishing rod. 1 

 think this inconsistency can be explained by the fact that 

 there are so many cheap rods and reels offered for sale that 

 those who have not studied the subject imagine that they can 

 get a first-class article for a very low price, and also by the 

 fact that many do not know what a good rod should be. 



But regardless of what I have said here, there are very 

 many to whom the initial outlay is something that simply 

 must be considered, and they cannot go above a certain 



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