GEORGE DAW SON, 55 



is man's memory, and by how slight a cord is it tied to the 

 past! The exact year is forgotten, but it was before 1854, 

 probably three years before. Mr. Dawson carried a short, 

 hand-made rod of some kind of wood, with ring guides, 

 the first thing of the kind I had seen, and that gave me 

 an impression that he must be a very superior angler, es- 

 pecially as he said that his father had brought expensive 

 rods for trout fishing from Scotland, but they had been 

 lost. This was a revelation! "Expensive rods" he 

 called them "rods" and the idea of paying money for 

 such things when we could cut an alder pole and thought 

 it expensive to buy fish hooks and lines; but, like the 

 Irishman's owl which he had bought for a parrot, I said 

 nothing, "but kept up a devil of a thinking." If money 

 had been more plentiful in boyish pockets it is doubtful 

 if its expenditure would have been in the direction of "fish 

 poles," which could be cut anywhere and thrown away 

 after use. This was a bit of dilettanteism in angling that 

 hardly seemed consistent with our primitive ideas of using 

 only those things which nature furnished, always except- 

 ing hooks and lines. His hooks were also a revelation. 

 We used only Limericks of large size, and boys usually 

 prefer big hooks because they look so strong, and they 

 fear that a big fish may break a small hook. Mr. Daw- 

 son's hooks were small and the wire was slim, but they 

 were long in the shank, something like the hook now 

 known as the "New York trout," if not the same, and the 

 most wonderful thing about them was that they were 

 neatly put on gut snells another new thing. He rigged 

 my line with one of the smallest hooks and discarded the 

 sinker, which before seemed to be an indispensable part 

 of a fishing outfit, and he showed us how to fish down 

 stream and how we must keep a good distance apart. We 

 fished with worms, and the slim, long-shanked hooks 



