"I've got a couple of split bamboo rods," he explained as the car
slid down the terrific grade of the Washington-Street hill. "I
haven't used 'em in years--not since we lived East; but they're
hand-made, and are tip-top. I haven't any other kind of tackle;
but it's just as well, because the tackle will all depend upon
where we are going to fish."

"Where's that?"

"Don't know yet; am going down now to find out."

He took her down to the principal dealer in sporting goods on
Market Street. It was a delicious world, whose atmosphere and
charm were not to be resisted. There were shot-guns in rows,
their gray barrels looking like so many organ-pipes; sheaves of
fishing-rods, from the four-ounce whisp of the brook-trout up to
the rigid eighteen-ounce lance of the king-salmon and sea-bass;
showcases of wicked revolvers, swelling by calibres into the
thirty-eight and forty-four man-killers of the plainsmen and
Arizona cavalry; hunting knives and dirks, and the slender steel
whips of the fencers; files of Winchesters, sleeping quietly in
their racks, waiting patiently for the signal to speak the one
grim word they knew; swarms of artificial flies of every
conceivable shade, brown, gray, black, gray-brown, gray-black,
with here and there a brisk vermilion note; coils of line, from
the thickness of a pencil, spun to hold the sullen plunges of a
jew-fish off the Catalina Islands, down to the sea-green gossamers
that a vigorous fingerling might snap; hooks, snells, guts,
leaders, gaffs, cartridges, shells, and all the entrancing