MISCELLANEOUS. 265 



those fine, dark specimens that are only found in the larger 

 streams and lakes, and his rounded sides show that he has 

 been well fed. 



You pass on down to where you see a large body of drift- 

 wood, near the right bank, and from the quiet repose which 

 the water bears there you know it is deep under that drift. 

 You stop fifty to a hundred feet above it, and repeat the 

 tactics described above. As regularly as the fly reaches 

 within a few feet of the drift you get a rise, until you take 

 out perhaps half-a-dozen fine fellows, when the others, if 

 there are others there, begin to " smell a mice," and you 

 pass on. 



Thus the time passed with us, and thus the sport was 

 varied, until we had covered over two miles and arrived at 

 camp at five o'clock in the evening, hungry enough to eat the 

 largest trout in the river. On counting up our strings we 

 found that they ran from fourteen to twenty-five to each man, 

 aggregating one hundred and sixty. The smallest one in the 

 lot weighed a quarter of a pound and the largest a pound, 

 the aggregate weight being over fifty pounds. 



That night a heavy rain came on and raised the stream 

 nearly a foot, so that our sport was not so good on the fol- 

 lowing day, though we succeeded in taking ninety-three. 

 The rain continued at intervals during the day, and as the 

 river was likely to remain swollen for several days, we decided 

 to remove over to Long lake and take a turn at the bass. The 

 Namecagon river is certainly one of the finest trout streams 

 in the Northwest. We saw, and heard enough to convince us 

 that there are no small trout in it. The large ones drive the 

 small ones out into the small streams. In our two days' fish- 

 ing we did not catch a single fingerling nothing that would 

 weigh less than a quarter of a pound, and we heard similar 

 reports from several other parties who were fishing at the 



