But boasting and self-glorification I would have excluded, and most
of all from the behaviour of the angler. He, more than other men,
is dependent for his success upon the favour of an unseen
benefactor. Let his skill and industry be never so great, he can do
nothing unless LA BONNE CHANCE comes to him.

I was once fishing on a fair little river, the P'tit Saguenay, with
two excellent anglers and pleasant companions, H. E. G---- and C. S.
D----. They had done all that was humanly possible to secure good
sport. The stream had been well preserved. They had boxes full of
beautiful flies, and casting-lines imported from England, and a rod
for every fish in the river. But the weather was "dour," and the
water "drumly," and every day the lumbermen sent a "drive" of ten
thousand spruce logs rushing down the flooded stream. For three
days we had not seen a salmon, and on the fourth, despairing, we
went down to angle for sea-trout in the tide of the greater
Saguenay. There, in the salt water, where men say the salmon never
take the fly, H. E. G----, fishing with a small trout-rod, a poor,
short line, and an ancient red ibis of the common kind, rose and
hooked a lordly salmon of at least five-and-thirty pounds. Was not
this pure luck?

Pride is surely the most unbecoming of all vices in a fisherman.
For though intelligence and practice and patience and genius, and
many other noble things which modesty forbids him to mention, enter
into his pastime, so that it is, as Izaak Walton has firmly
maintained, an art; yet, because fortune still plays a controlling
hand in the game, its net results should never be spoken of with a
haughty and vain spirit. Let not the angler imitate Timoleon, who
boasted of his luck and lost it. It is tempting Providence to print