"Do not despair. There was-alas! that I must say there was --an illustrious philosopher, who was nearly of the age of fifty before he made angling a pursuit, yet he became a distinguished fly-fisher."-Sir Humphry Davy.

"Fly-fishing for grayling and trout are not altogether identical. Both are frequently found in the same water, and are to be taken with the same cast of flies. Finer tackle, as a rule, is required in the case of the former, as also smaller and brighter flies." -David Foster.

"The grayling generally springs entirely out of the water when first struck by the hook, and tugs strongly at the line, requiring as much dexterity to land it safely as it would to secure a trout of six times the size."-Dr. Richardson.

"Grayling will often take the fly under water, rising so quietly that you will scarcely see any rise or break of the water at all. It is desirable, therefore, to watch the line narrowly, and to strike whenever you think it stops or checks, and you will now and then be surprised, although there is no break in the water, to find a good grayling on the hook. For, as is often the case with trout, the big ones are very quiet risers."-Francis Francis.

"To be a perfect fisherman you require more excellencies than are usually to be found in such a small space as is allotted to a man's carcass."-Parker Gilmore.

"The trout has, so to speak, a Herculean cast of beauty; the grayling rather that of an Apollo-light, delicate, and gracefully symmetrical."-H. Cholmondely-Pennell.

THE GRAYLING.

BY

FRED MATHER.

my

THE very name of beloved fish calls up a host of recollections that form themselves into a picture that, above all others, is the most cheerful one adorning memory's wall. We old fellows live largely in the past, and can afford to let younger men revel in the future; and in my own case, I can say that, having filled Shakespeare's apothegm of "one man in his time plays many parts," there are often retrospects of life as a boyish angler, an older hunter, trapper, and general vagabond on the frontiers; a soldier; and a later return to a first love. Of these glances over the shoulder of time, a few trips to Northern Michigan and its grayling streams mark the journey of life with a white stone.

When Prof. Cope announced, in 1865, that he had received specimens from Michigan, the English anglers in America were incredulous, and there was some spicy correspondence, in the sportsmen's papers of those days, concerning the identity of the fishes. As usual, the scientist discomfited the angler, and proved his position. The fish had long been known to the raftsmen and natives of Michigan by local names, but had never been

identified as the historic grayling. Some eight years after the discovery of Prof. Cope that we had the grayling in American waters, Mr. D. H. Fitzhugh, Jr., sent some of them to Mr. Charles Hallock, then editor of Forest and Stream, and they were shown in New York to the doubters, who even then were not convinced.

Mr. Fitzhugh took great interest in the new fish, which, as a lumberman and an angler, he had long known as a "Michigan trout," but had never recognized as the gentle grayling, and he has since done more than any other man to popularize it and introduce it to anglers.

He invited Mr. Hallock, Prof. Milner, and myself to come up and fish for it, and we each extolled its attractions in the press. As a consequence, the fish has been nearly exterminated by vandals who fish for count, and the waters where we fished at first are nearly barren.

Of all game fishes the grayling is my favorite. It is gamy but not savage; one does not feel the savage instinct to kill that the black bass or the pike raises in him, but rather a feeling of love for a vigorous fighter for its life who is handicapped with a tender mouth. To me the fish is always thought of as the "gentle grayling," and the "golden-eyed grayling," although the latter epithet is not always a correct one, owing to the changes in the iris.

In fishing for grayling it is well to use a mediumsized fly of a subdued color; a yellow body and a brown wing is the fly that should be used if only one is

recommended; it is a most killing combination. Brown Hackles, Red Ibis, Professor, Queen of the Water, and other trout flies are also killing; but the first-mentioned fly, whose name I do not know, owing to a defective memory and the vagaries of fly nomenclature, is the most killing, and a cast into the upper edge of a pool below a rapid is usually most successful.*

The beauty of the grayling is of a kind that is better appreciated after some acquaintance. The bright colors of its "magnificent dorsal," as the phrase went a few years ago, are not its chief claim to admiration. Its shapely contour, striped ventrals, iridescent caudal, and its beatific countenance win the heart of the angler and make him love the grayling, and feel that it is a fish to respect for the higher qualities expressed in its physiognomy, and not one that it is merely a satisfaction to kill as he would a savage pike. True, we kill the grayling, but we do it in a different spirit from that in which we kill some other thing. It was not only my good fortune to know "Uncle Thad" Norris, but to have fished with him. The dear lovable old man, who long since paid his fare to the grim ferryman, once said: "When I look into a grayling's eye I am sorry I killed it; but that feeling never prevents me from making another cast just to see if another will rise."

In another century Norris will be more read and appreciated than he is to-day. Of all American angling

* Oak-fly.

writers of this century he will stand foremost, and yet he never wrote as fully as he intended of the fish that he told me had afforded him more pleasure than any other. He had not revised his "American Angler's Book" for some time before his death, and so his remarks on Back's grayling must stand as he wrote them before the era of the Michigan grayling. He there says of the Arctic grayling: "The grayling being a fish in the capture of which the American angler cannot participate, we give no account of the manner of angling for them, but refer the reader who may have interest or curiosity on that score to English authors." He intended to revise that sentence and give his own experience, but the Reaper judged him ripe for the harvest before he did. it. In my opinion he was one of those who should never have been ripe for that harvest, and his loss to our angling literature was a severe one.

That the grayling will take bait, truth requires the admission; would that it were not so. I would prefer that its food was the soaring insect, or even the floating thistledown, with an occasional feather from an angel's wing dropped in the moonlit flood; but science has laid bare its interior with the searching scalpel, and the Cæsarian operation has brought forth the lowly caddis-worm and other larvæ, and the bait-fisher has taken advantage of the knowledge and pandered to the baser appetite of the fish.

That the grayling does not eat other fish is proved