338 Book of the Black Bass. 



CHAPTER XX. 



THE BLACK BASS AS A GAJIE FISH. 



"He is a fish that links close all winter; but is very pleasant 

 and jolly after mid-April, and in May, and in the hot months.'" — 



IZAAK ^^'ALTON. 



Those who have tasted the lotus of salmon, or trout 

 fishing, in that Utopian clime of far away — while reveling 

 in its aesthetic atmosphere, and surrounded by a misty halo 

 of spraj' from the waterfall, or enveloped by the filmy 

 gauze and iridescent haze of the cascade — have inscribed 

 tomes, sang idyls, chanted pssans, and poured out libations 

 in honor and praise of the silver-spangled salmon, or the 

 rnby-studded troiit, while it is left to the ^■nlgar horde of 

 black bass anglers to stand upon the mountain of their 

 own doubt and presumption, and, with uplifted hands, 

 in admiration and awe, gaze with dazed eyes from afar 

 upon that forbidden land — that terra incognita — and 

 then, having lived in vain, die and leave no sign. 



It is, then, with a spirit of rank heresy in my heart: 

 with smoked glass spectacles on my nose, to dim the glare 

 and glamour of the transcendent shore; with the scales of 

 justice across mv shoulder — M. salm aides in one scoop 

 and M. dolornieii in the other — I pass the barriers and 

 confines of the enchanted land, and toss them into a stream 

 that has been depopulated of even fingerlings. by the dilet- 

 tanti of salmon and trout fishers; for I would not, even 

 here, put black bass in a stream inhabited by salmon or 

 brook trout. 



AVhile watching the plebeian interlopers sporting in an 



