TO THE READER. 



\i 



copies of those found in Dr. Holbrook's work. The vignettes are the 

 production of the pencil of a good brother of the angle, an amateur, 

 drawn mostly for his own amusement and occasionally for mine, as 

 the subjects have been presented to his appreciative eye during the 

 last ten or twelve years. Many of them are his earlier sketches. He 

 has expressed an unwillingness that I should reproduce them, after 

 finding that I was in earnest in doing so in this work j but I have, in 

 most cases, so intimately associated them with the subjects or topics 

 to which they serve as vignettes, that I cannot oblige him by relin- 

 quishing my purpose. 



Most of the tackle and diagrams, and a few of the fish, were drawn 

 by the writer ; I confess with some labor, for they are purely 

 mechanical productions. 



All of the drawings on wood, with the exception of the plate of 

 hooks and Salmon-flies by Mr. Wilhelm, are by D. Gordon Yates, of 

 this city, and were cut by himself or under his supervision. 



I have received so many useful hints from Dr. Bethune's notes to 

 his edition of Walton, and from English works on angling during the 

 last fifteen or twenty years, that I am at a loss to whom to accredit 

 any particular item of information ; having so entirely appropriated 

 such knowledge, and stored and mingled it with whatever necessity 

 and some aptness of my own has taught me, as to consider all alike 

 my own property. 



Tackle-making I have learned as a pleasant recreation. My tactics 

 and rules are based OB- my own experience and upon that of brethren 

 of the rod with whom I have angled. So also is my knowledge of 

 fishing-grounds. 



Anglers are all more or less conceited, or, to say the least, self- 

 opinioned, and I may at times have given directions or laid down 

 rules contrary to the views or practice of the reader, or may not have 

 expressed myself as plainly as I endeavored to do ; but 



" What is writ is writ ; 

 Would it were worthier." 



And I only ask the same indulgence of opinion I am willing to extend 

 to those who hold opposite notions. 



