THE BLACK BASS 



from some earlier Walton, and Juliana Berners had a standard 

 of sport high and lofty that will outlast the ages ; I doubt if it 

 can be improved upon. 



I have taken more bass in the St. Lawrence Eiver with a 

 ' St. Patrick ' than with any other fly ; and unquestionably the 

 little bass is very freakish ; he prefers something odd and queer, 

 as does the salmon. The ' coachman ' is very killing on dark 

 days, and on lighter ones, the darker flies — a, rule like the laws 

 of the Medes and Persians. The Indians on the Feather Eiver in 

 California, I have referred to, with their bunch of feathers 

 dangling in the wind, inherited the device from some ancestor. 

 They may have gotten it from Theocritus who, two centuries 

 before Christ, wrote of ' the bait fallacious suspended from the 

 rod ' ; or it may have come down from some ancestor in the 

 third century after Christ about which Aelian writes, in his 

 De AnimaUum Natura. He is referring to the Macedonians who 

 fished the little river Astracus, which runs between Boroca and 

 Thessalonica. 



Here is the translation, previously referred to. 



' I have heard of a Macedonian way of catching fish, and it is this. 

 Between Boroca and Thessalonica runs a river called the Astracus, and 

 in it there are fish with spotted (or speckled) skias ; what the natives 

 of the country call them you had better ask the Macedonians,. These 

 fish feed on a fiy wMch is pecuHar to the country, and which hovers over 

 the rivers. It is not like the flies found elsewhere, nor does it resemble 

 a wasp in appearance, nor in shape would one justly describe it a midge 

 or bee, yet it has something of each of these. In boldness it is hke a fly, 

 in size you might call it a bee ; it imitates the colour of a wasp, and it 

 hums like a bee. The natives call it a Hippourus. As these flies seek 

 their food over the river, they do not escape the observation of the fish 

 swimming below. When, then, a fish observes a fiy hovering above, it 

 swims quietly up, fearing to agitate the water lest it should scare away its 

 prey ; then, coming up by its own shadow, it opens its jaws and gulps 

 down the fly, hke a woU carrying off sheep from the farmyard ; having 

 done this, it withdraws under the rippling water. Now, though the 

 fishermen know of this, they do not use these flies at aU for bait for the 

 fish ; for, if a man's hand touch them, they lose their colour, their wings 

 decay, and they become unfit for food for the fish. For this reason they 



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