Orentnc Day or tur Trovutina Srason. 161 
in a condition of harmony never dreamed of by the care-worn 
racer after the rusty dollar. 
Persons who have never practiced the angler’s gentle art 
can scarcely appreciate the feelings which well up in the 
soul of an expert who has studied nature, the habits of trout, 
and the devices necessary to present lures gracefully for their 
acceptance. His fly-rod is twelve and a half feet in length, 
including a telling-top of split bamboo. His reel is a narrow 
click one, upon which is wound a braided line of silk and 
hair, which tapers from the middle to each end, and is thirty 
yards in length. A nine-feet-long casting-line is looped to the 
end, and with the attractions of a cinnamon fly as a stretch- 
er, a gray professor as the first drop, and a red ibis as the 
hand-fly, he feels sure that the trout in the first pool will leap 
for joy at his approach. As he walks over the meadows, sees 
the birds, hears all nature waking into new life, his very step 
upon the mead when the grass is beginning to shoot confers 
a sense of velvety elasticity ; and as he nears the stream, sees 
the cat-tails of the willows dip and play on the margin of the 
ripple, and the trout rising and leaping after flies so that they 
cast miniature rainbows over the stream, with cautious step 
he approaches within casting distance of the pool. He makes 
a cast, and a large trout mects his fly and fastens. For an in- 
stant the angler is transfixed! The old sensation of rapture 
returns with the new spring, and as the circulation of his 
blood quickens, he spontaneously ejaculates, “ Well, this is 
worth living for!” 
L 
