of fishing tackle, "marked down from $60.00 for to-day only," rent
a canoe, hire a guide at more than human life is worth in courts
of law, and work with dogged patience from gray dawn till sunset.
And for what? For one small bass which could have been bought at
any trustworthy market for sixty-five cents, or, possibly, some
poor little kitten-fish-offspring of a catfish--whose mother's
milk is not yet dry upon its lips.

Other fish who have just been weaned and are beginning to notice
solid food will repeatedly take a hook too large to swallow, and
be dragged into the boat, literally, by the skin of the teeth.
Note the cheerful little sunfish, four inches long, which is caught
first on one side of the boat and then on the other, by the patient
fisherman angling off a rocky, weedy point for bass.

But, as Grover Cleveland said: "He is no true fisherman who is
willing to fish only when fish are biting." The real angler will
sit all day in a boat in a pouring rain, eagerly watching the point
of the rod, which never for an instant swerves a half inch from
the horizontal. The real angler will troll for miles with a hand
line and a spinner, winding in the thirty-five dripping feet of
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the lure every ten minutes, to remove a weed, or "to see if she's
still a-spinnin'." Vainly he hopes for the muskellunge who has just
gone somewhere else, but, by the same token, the sure-enough angler
is ready to go out next morning, rain or shine, at sunrise.

It is a habit of Unshelled Fish to be in other places, or, possibly,
at your place, but at another time. The guide can never understand
what is wrong. Five days ago, he himself caught more bass than