could not receive a challenge from a fish without returning an impetuous "strike" on the instant. One may "strike" too soon as well as too late. In angling, as in everything else, there is a "happy mean just the right mode and moment to strike your fish without imperilling your tackling or tearing the hook from his mouth. To invariably compass this right moment requires steadier nerve, greater forbearance and a nicer appreciation of time and opportunity than falls to the lot of most anglers. A few have the gift; but it only comes to old trout fishers after much practice and many discomfitures.

Our friend had been casting half an hour at “a gay gambolier" whose special vocation seemed to be to leap at nothing and keep just a tail's breadth from the lure sent to him. His disportings proved his agility but were provokingly tantalizing; and DUN was just ready to give him up as "a hopeless case," when he made a dash for the fly and was astonished to find himself hooked. With a rush and a leap which eclipsed all his previous demonstrations, he started for the opposite shore as if in a hurry to deliver some message he had forgotten. It was just the last place in the neighborhood of the pool one cared to have his fish take to, for it was full of jagged rocks and hidden bowlders. Aware of this, DUN instantly did his best to bring

him back into open water. But after a few desperate tugs, he was compelled, for the time, to give up the effort and permit him to sulk-preserving, however, a taut line, measured with mathematical nicety, upon the stubborn brute. Salmon will sometimes sulk thus for hours, in seeming disregard and contempt of any pressure you dare bring upon them. For more than thirty minutes DUN sat

"Like Patience on a monument, smiling at Grief,"

when he deemed it high time to assume the aggressive. So he ordered his canoemen to paddle cautiously toward the "objective point,” while he reeled up his two hundred feet of taut line until every muscle ached with the pressure. He had reached within fifty feet of his leader, but not a tail wagged; thirty feet, but nothing was felt but the steady tension of the quivering line; ten feet, the same. All was as still and motionless as the old granite bowlder which looked down upon the dark waters amid whose eddying currents leader and fly were hidden from vision. Angler and gaffer were alike perplexed. So near a fish and no sign of life! Nothing like it had passed into the annals of angling. "Slide your paddle down cautiously and start him," said DUN. Down slid the paddle, but nothing came of it. 'Try again; but take care that he doesn't rush under the canoe."

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Down again went the paddle, when, mystery of mysteries! it struck, not a salmon, but the rock around which the salmon had twisted the leader, broken loose from the fly and so escaped, a wiser if not a better fish, quite prepared to resume his game of leap-frog long before his disappointed captor could reel in the fifty ton bowlder at which he had been tugging lustily for more than thirty minutes!

Our conversation in camp was of rather a frivolous character that evening. We were afraid to introduce any weighty subject lest our friend should interpret it as a personal reflection!

CHAPTER XVII.

DIFFERENCE IN FISH GAFFING SALMON THE

REEL-CLICK.

Doubt not, sir, but that Angling is an art, and an art worth your learning: the question is, rather, whether you be capable of learning it.-[Sir Izaak Walton.

N one sense, all salmon, like all men, are alike: but like all men, also, they are very unlike in behavior under given circumstances. I once brought a fifteen-pound salmon to gaff in ten minutes, and I have had a two hours' struggle with others of no greater weight; just as some men suc

cumb when so much as a shadow

of adversity crosses their pathway, while others fight on so long as a peg remains to hang a hope upon. The former are the negatives of the race, only useful in swelling the numerals of a census table. The latter not only "conquer fate" by their pluck and energy, but are the architects of towns, cities, states and empires. It is only when "Greek meets Greek" that there "comes the tug of war," and it is only when the angler strikes a