that a piece of salt pork, added to the 
lure, would be just the thing; all three 
began the process of “poring the pork” 
into them on the morning of the fourth 
day. We whipped the stream through 
a long and beautiful eddy with no re- 
sults. Gray suddenly discovered that 
his hand was not so well as he had 
thought, and we turned in. The other 
two came in later, wishing, I am sure, 
they had a sore hand or two, for they 
were without a fish or an alibi. 
HIS account sounds solemn and 
serious, but the party was neither. 
Good-natured banter was the order of 
the day—listening to Gray and Sperry 
lambast one another was a treat. In 
the evening the farmer boys gathered 
to the shack, and some of the more 
unsophiticated among them were sure 
something desperate would occur before 
we got home. Out of the argument, 
that was continuous, grew a limerick 
which ran as follows: 
“There once a fellow named 
Sperry, 
Who was always mean and contrary, 
He put salt in our dinner, 
So we killed the old sinner, 
And now we have Sperry to bury.” 
was 
This was recited very solemnly to 
the farmer boys one day before Sperry 
came in, and they were wondering for 
a time whether to take it seriously! 
Gray was our chief cook, but his ef- 
forts at breakfast time were confined 
to eating! Gray loves to sleep. We 
had improvised beds made of the latest 
product of the meadows, which justified 
the following: 
“There once was a fellow named Gray, 
Who loved to sleep in the hay, 
He fished with a fly, 
And he caught ’em—me eye! 
He should have been eating the hay.” 
Ape 3 sarcasm of the last line may be 
a little too subtle for one who 
merely reads it, but it was not lost 
on our party. We had it set to music 
before the week was over. 
The morning of the fifth day saw 
a strange thing happen. By common 
consent the whole party decided they 
should get some minnows for me to 
fish with! I sud- 
denly became an 
object of their 
earnest solici- 
tude. As far as 
I could learn, no 
man had ever 
fished with min- 
nows out of that 
shack, and lived 
to tell it. There 
relic of a minnow seine among all the 
equipment that crowded the place; yet, 
here were three experts who not only 
admitted it was the proper thing to 
do, but voluntarily sallied forth to 
catch the minnows for me! Truly, 
“necessity is the mother of invention” 
—and often the father of lies!— 
Among the plunder at the shack was 
a large mosquito net shaped to com- 
pletely entomb a double bed. This was 
dragged forth; bread was tied in the 
center of it. We waded out into the 
stream and weighted it down, and 
waited. After two hours we counted 
about forty minnows, large and small, 
mostly small, very small, and the deed 
was done. 
CHARGE no man and no set of men 
with having ulterior motives, but all 
of them had to face their friends upon 
the return, and I call the world to tes- 
tify to the fact that never yet has a 
set of fishermen returned from a trip 
and admitted they caught no fish! 
After all, a fish is a fish, regardless of 
age, size or previous condition of servi- 
tude, and “forty fish for four fellows,” 
has an alliteration to it that might 
make anyone feel the week had not 
been spent in vain. 
Somewhere, somehow, somebody 
caught a bass that day. After the 
dishes were cleared away a great scien- 
tific operation was performed that 
night. It was a major operation. The 
object was to discover just what the 
fish were feeding on. The stomach was 
carefully dissected out and removed, 
and then—opened. The secret was to 
be learned at last. From its contents, 
we were to learn just what lure to use. 
UT, low and behold, the stomach 
of this one-pound bass was just 
exactly like Mother Hubbard’s cub- 
bard! It was interesting to watch the 
faces of those three experts. They 
were .disappointed and _ chagrined. 
True, they had made a great discov- 
ery: the fish were not feeding on any- 
thing! Unbelievable as this may seem, 
it was true. As I had watched these 
three fishermen plying the rod—pour- 
ing the pork into them, or, to be more 
technical, whipping the stream, for the 
past five days without the slightest 
sign of a rise, somewhere down in my 


was not even a 
524 
This, we think, is a fitting tailpiece. 










inexperienced, inner-consciousness I had 
got a hunch that the fish were not bit- 
ing, but this fact had not occurred to 
these men before. 
4 Bence say you can prove anything 
from history and the Bible; well 
that empty stomach of a one- -pound. 
fish proved one thing to these three 
fishermen and an entirely different 
thing to me. While they at once con- 
cluded the fish were not feeding on 
anything, because this particular fish 
had an empty stomach, nothing could 
have been more illogical. The physi 
cal facts were against them. This fish 
had tried to feed on their lure, they 
had the fish to prove that. It would 
certainly not have tried to feed a a 
fly when its stomach was full. This. 
line of reasoning led me to the con- 
clusion that the fish took the lure be 
cause it was hungry. However, this 
led me to a conclusion which was out 
of harmony with one I had previously 
reached, and which I have already ex- 
pressed herein, to wit: that the fish do 
not really try to eat this monstrosity 
of a so-called lure, but get mad and 
fight it. A conviction had been grow- 
ing on me during the week that the 
fish along this stream had spent so 
much of their valuable time fighting 
these strange objects that they had de- 
cided not to fight any longer—had 
joined the third party, perhaps—and 
become pacifists—peace at any price. 
However, the fact that this hungry fish 
had tried to capture this bait, seemed 
to utterly disprove my theory that the 
fish had too much sense to be tempted 
or to be fooled by this lure. 
( 
[e the hope of getting a little light, r 
propounded this query to the three 
fishermen. If fish will not strike when 
their stomachs are empty, when will 
they strike, and if this fish did not 
strike because its stomach was empty, 
why did it strike? I didn’t get any 
light. Hyland started off on a tale of 
what happened the last time he was 
fishing at Lake Geneva; Sperry 
launched into the “luring” qualities of 
different kinds of lures; and Gray be- 
came very busy and excited explaining 
to both of them at the same time just 
why neither one of them knew whe 
they were talking about. 
I proceeded to 
find the answer 
to my own ques- 
tion. Seizing the 
knife, I  deliber- 
ately cut. the 
fish’s head in 
two, and, just as 
I had_ expected, 
the poor fish did 
not have any 
(Cont. on p. 566) 

