THE GAME PISHES OP THE WOELD 



some Pacific salmon will take a fly ; but the only rises I had were 

 of snipe, which went whistling over us, or beautiful magpies 

 which were continually flying laboriously across the little river 

 as though to display their abxmdant plumage, and as I was looking 

 xit the water I saw them upside down. After several hours of 

 this I surrendered and replaced the fly, I was then trying, 

 with a Wnson spoon — ^a concession to the inevitable — ^and 

 l)egan to troll, that is I paid out one hundred feet of line 

 and my boatman rowed slowly along, the lure being six inches 

 below the surface. 



' The generous gushing of the springs. 

 When the angler goes a-trolling, 

 The stir of song and summer wings, 

 The line which shines, and life which sings 

 Make earth replete with happy things. 

 When the angler goes a-trolIing.' 



Stoddart. 



I was using a Divine-made eight-ounce split bamboo or cane 

 rod about ten feet long, ai tapered oiled-silk line I had purchased 

 of Hardy in London in 1910, and one of his trout reels ; so it was 

 not salmon tackle in any sense. We made the change near the 

 mouth and rowed slowly upstream. I was sitting facing the 

 stern on a board placed across the rails — a Santa Oatalina fashion 

 — ^my boatman regaling me with the wonderful catches of trout 

 he had seen made here, when without warning I had a strike 

 vrhich almost took the rod out of my hands, as at that particular 

 second I was following a magpie upside down across the little 

 xiver. 



The fish hooked himself, so violent was the rush, and in a 

 second of time I was torn from a Waltonian contemplation of 

 nature to the vigorous play of a salmon fresh from the sea. I 

 hooked the fish in a large pool ; his first rush took fifty feet of line, 

 to the blare of the English click, then I checked him hoping to 

 see him leap. But he was a king of the sulkers and never showed 

 264 



