March 23, 1912 
FOREST AND STREAM 
3Go 
Scarcely a breath of air was stirring as we 
came in sight of the ruined dam, and the sun¬ 
light poured warmly down into the clearing, 
calling forth myriads of little gnats and flies 
that danced up and down in the air in regiments 
and battalions. In the lee of a pile of rocks a 
bed of hepatica blossoms seemed to catch and 
hold the blue of the sky; anemones and dog¬ 
tooth violets wandered about among the scat¬ 
tered clumps of bushes. But, most welcome 
sight of all, was a spreading ring of ripples on 
the surface of the pool below the dam. 
Did we go after him with worms? Not by 
any means. We just got rid of those short bait 
leaders, put on a couple of six-foot ones with 
a March brown and coachman on each, and pro¬ 
ceeded to enjoy as pretty a bit of April fly¬ 
fishing as it has ever been my good fortune to 
experience. The fish were not large—none that we 
took measured over nine inches—but they were 
genuine fontinalis, and seemed to be waiting for 
us in every favorable nook throughout those 
hundred yards of sunlit water. Several times 
we took two and three from a pool, and one 
rocky basin yielded four. My first cast over it 
had resulted in a double; then the artist tried, 
and a single fish took the March brown; he cast 
again, and a nine-incher made the mistake of 
thinking that the coachman would be good to 
eat. “And this,” remarked the artist, as he 
slid his net under the latest victim, “is in a part 
of the State that is supposed to be fished out! 
I wonder how much longer we would be able to 
have fun like this if the news of it should get 
beyond the few of us who are already in the 
secret. And it’s surprising, too, that the brook 
is not better known, for you remember it’s not 
so very many years since the club which con¬ 
trolled it broke up. Most of the old members 
were city mep, but they never seem to come up 
here now. Still, their loss is our gain, and 
“supposed to be fished out.” 
such being the case, let’s sprawl out on that 
flat rock and eat lunch.” 
Mid-afternoon found us in another meadow, 
a much more extensive one. A series of little 
ponds had been built there by the old fishing 
club to which the dry-fly artist had referred, 
and even now a few of them still remain. In 
the deep water thus caused the trout usually 
run somewhat larger than in other parts of the 
brook, but the fisherman’s peace of mind may 
be a little disturbed by a certain old red cow 
of disagreeable temper, which the present owner 
of the land pastures there instead of putting up 
trespass signs. 
We knew this cow of old; in fact, she had 
chased us on several previous occasions, and we 
had very vivid recollections of hurriedly scaling 
the boundary fence while the old brute came 
"WITH LITTLE RAPIDS AND FALLS.” 
tearing through the grass about four jumps be¬ 
hind us. So on this particular afternoon we 
surveyed the ground from a safe vantage point 
before entering the meadow, and finally located 
the ancient bovine in a distant corner where she 
was too engrossed in cropping the fresh grass 
about a little spring to notice us as we crossed 
the fence and began to fish. 
All went well until we reached the far side 
of the inclosure, where a barbed-wire fence 
crosses the brook, sagging almost to the water 
over the center of a deep pool. The artist had 
seen a trout rise close to the drooping wire, 
so he crawled along the bank to a favorable 
position for casting while I crossed the fence 
into the adjoining field and was soon busy with 
another fish. So interested did we both become 
that we had forgotten all about our old enemy, 
when something caused me to glance toward the 
pool by the fence. There crouched the artist 
absorbed in fishing, and, to my horror, about 
twenty feet behind him was the red cow, sneak¬ 
ing quietly forward with an ugly expression in 
her little pig eyes. There was barely time to 
roar, “Lookout! Cow!” before she lowered 
her head, switched her tail and “came a- 
runnin’.” 
Now, the dry-fly artist is a man of parts, and 
perhaps the longest and most conspicuous of 
those parts are his legs. So extensive are 
they that when he needs a new pair of waders 
he has to have them built to order, for the ordi¬ 
nary ones don’t come much above his knees. 
He can walk up a flight of stairs five at 
a time and never turn a hair, while as for 
jumping-1 
’When he heard my warning shout he hesi¬ 
tated not as to the manner of his action. He 
took no backward glance, but simply leaped-—■ 
blindly, frantically, straight ahead. Those won¬ 
derful legs straightened out like a couple of 
giant springs, and propelled him forward and 
upward for all the world like a big kangaroo 
clearing a clump of brush. I'd hate to say how 
far that single bound carried him, but it was 
well over on the safe side of the fence. And as 
his flight commenced to lower, those triple-ex- 
tension shanks began wildly sawing the air as 
if they already felt the solid ground beneath 
them. Even had there been no protecting 
fence, I doubt if any cow on earth could have 
caught the artist after that, for his first foot to 
touch terra firma sent him ahead about three 
yards, and he was into his stride and going 
like a crack quarter-miler before I could sfop 
him. 
“Truly,” he observed, when he had slowed 
down and turned back to where I was throwing 
stones at the cause of the ascension, “ ‘it is not 
all of fishing to fish,’ but it seems to me that 
writers on angling matters have overlooked one 
important branch of the sport. Some time when 
I get a few weeks’ holiday I’m going to write 
a treatise on ‘The Practical Application of Long 
Legs to the Art of Fly-Fishing, or A Trout 
Stream as Seen from Upper Air.’ I’m sure it 
would be a valuable contribution to angling 
literature.” 
Of the closing hours of that April day I do 
not need to tell at length. You all know what 
they were like; how the air became damper 
and just a little chilly as the sun dropped below 
the woods; how the pungent odor of burning 
leaves and brush drifted down into the valley 
from the old cornfield where the farmers were 
making ready for spring planting; the way 'the 
shrill music of the peepers in the swamp 
trembled through the dusk as we walked back 
along the sandy road to the farmhouse, and how 
we nearly went to sleep in the smoker during 
the long ride home. 
“Well,” I asked the artist, when at last we had 
• A DRINK FROM NATURE'S CUP. 
left the train and reached the parting of our 
ways. “Is your fever better?” 
He paused to relight his pipe, the yellow flare 
of the match alternately growing and waning as 
he puffed. “Yes, it’s a whole lot better—it’s 
almost cured for the present. But I don’t be¬ 
lieve that any amount of fishing will positively 
stop it for good and all; it takes too strong a 
hold on you for that.” 
