valorous fishermen, am persuaded that it is next door to an impossibility 
to be a chronic fisherman and not become a chronic hyperbolist (I use 
this term out of my love for my fishermen friends, and my disinclina- 
tion to use the more ordinary and direct word which differs in no slight- 
est shade of meaning. I refer to the little radical among the words 
which is pronounced liar). There must be some men of unimpaired 
virtue (1 do not speak this in any haughty spirit). Truthfulness, like 
persecuted goodness, must have some fortress to which to retreat; and 
in claiming to be an unsuccessful fisherman it occurs to me that it has 
become apparent that | am this rocky fortress of incorrupted truth. 
Fish and men, specially the fish, may depend on me. I absolutely re- 
fuse to prevaricate unless it be entirely convenient. 
If I have been digging for morals when | should have been digging 
bait and baiting my hook, | beg to suggest I have been decoyed to it 
by the moralizing moods of the professional fisherman. He always acts 
as if he fished from the same motive as he says his prayers, namely, 
piety; though | for my part think it a slimy trick to hide play under the 
cloud of devotion. If men will fish let them not preach and attempt to 
persuade others they are doing it as an act of religion. To be Shake- 
spearean (a manner quite foreign to me), ‘‘ Methinks they do profess too 
much.’" I knew a truthful fisherman once (he is dead); and I feel 
honor bound to prepare him an epitaph, though not at this time. But a 
truthful fisherman has a right to pass into the list of heroes who over- 
bore environment and gave the lie to centuries of precedent. 
| have some friends, good men and true at home and in business, 
but who seem to cast from them all their fine ethical distinctions so 
soon as they get a fish pole in their hands; and when they have donned 
fisherman's boots and have hold on a reel, then farewell, beautiful truth. 
“As soon as they smell fish their truthfulness evaporates, or at all events 
disappears, and | think the most scientific explanation of its disappear- 
ance is to ascribe it to evaporation which goes on so systematically on 
the water, as is known to all students of meteorology. These friends of 
mine fish in remote waters, where, because of the remote distances and 
the lack of shipping facilities, the spoils can not be sent to admiring 
friends. The fisherman is thought to be by nature a sociable biped, and 
generous in delivering up his ill-gotten gains to those who sunburned 
not neither baite’ a hook. But these good men and true must smother 
their generous impulses. They are perforce reduced to the necessity of 
eating their own catch, or giving most of it to aborigines who inhabit the 
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