The Trout of the Great Forest 127 



who see joys in rocky and unpassable streams, down which, 

 well booted, they prefer to slide, stumble and sometimes 

 roll and swim ; exploits altogether arboreal, aerial, language- 

 producing exploits, which need not be dwelt upon. The 

 San Lorenzo was a paradise of its kind — there was no ques- 

 tion as to that — but when the stream narrowed down and 

 took the shape of the letter S it was different. In just such 

 places the trout congregate to laugh at the angler, to lie 

 in cool riffles, head up stream, and watch the fly-caster in 

 extremis, as he assays trees in wading boots ; but a veil may 

 be drawn over the sadness of this feature of angling, and a 

 picture of an angler with his fly, with a record in five coun- 

 ties, thirty feet up a tree, wiped from the slate of memory. 



Wading slowly, I came to a long reach of water. The 

 great trees cast dark shadows all about, and upon one side 

 rose abruptly for several hundred feet, while on the other 

 a little beach came tumbling down to the water. I gradually 

 increased the length of my casts, a part of angling, " getting 

 out line," which has its peculiar fascinations, and by mere 

 chance or good luck dropped the bunch of impossible 

 feathers lightly, just in a little riffle where the cool water 

 was flowing musically down over polished pebbles. 



A gleam of silvery foam appeared and the resilient split 

 bamboo shot the message to the reel that blazoned an alarm 

 and sent a thrill up the rod handle telling the story of a 

 strike ; a very simple, foolish thing to the layman, yet some- 

 thing to upset the dignity of the most reverend seignor, 

 something which places a five-year-old schoolboy on terms of 

 equality with the President of the Board of Education, 

 perhaps the most awful figure in his range of vision. 



I had a strike in the best of places and held my fish for a 

 moment in the very joy of conquest, literally forced him up 

 into the air, where I could see him gleam against the green 

 bay leaves, and could catch the musical splash of his return, 

 held firmly by an impossible glass-like cord woven by a silk- 

 worm, a thing he could break if I made the slightest mis- 



