An editor's life is neither the best nor the worst in which to cultivate this rare gift. There are those in the profession who can so concentrate their thoughts that even the pertinacious pleadings of a score of office-seekers cannot tangle the thread of their meditations; and sometimes even the least gifted among us have to throw off sentences amid such persistent din that Bedlam itself would seem the abode of silence. What little of the art came to me by nature and compulsory practice has been strengthened by the opportunities for silent meditation afforded by the habit of angling. My guide, who knew and humored my moods, was not, therefore, greatly startled when, in passing the approach to Cold brook, I broke the long silence with the very unintelligible exclamation: "He was a cunning old rat." It was the climax of a half hour's cogitation upon the protracted waiting and watching which finally resulted in the capture of the three-pound trout in the form and manner recounted in my last chapter. My guide very quietly responded (as if instinctively divining the subject of my meditations) to my involuntary observation with the simple question: "Did you land him?" And then I became as voluble as I had before been silent in recounting to him the incident already related to my readers. And just this is the thread upon which I have strung this bit of "abstraction."

At the rapids, about midway between the lower and middle Saranac lakes, there is as pretty a place from which to cast as can be found in the world. You stand upon solid rock, slightly elevated above the rapid-flowing stream, and can throw, if you have the skill, without fear of bush or brake, an hundred feet. It is the first opportunity one has, en route, after his long winter's rest, to shake out the wrinkles of disuse. I sometimes wonder whether, on some pleasant day in May, not long hence, I shall stand on this sunny spot, where I have stood during some portion of every season these twenty years, and find, in attempting to make my usual cast, that my "right hand has forgot its cunning." As old age cools the blood and dims the vision, and checks the elasticity of brain and limb, such thoughts sometimes come to the most buoyant, and often cast a shadow across the sunniest landscape. But it is only a shadow. With the thought comes up the vision of another river, brighter and clearer and purer than that which flows with such gentle gracefulness at my feet — "a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb." It is a vision which reconciles all thoughtful anglers to the quick-coming time when these pleasant places, which now know them, shall know them no more forever.

For the first time in all my experience, I had no response here to my persistent appeals for a rise. There were a hundred spots within easy cast, which looked inviting. By some undefinable association, I found myself parodying that pleasant old song, "A Cot in the wood "- probably because of the applicability of two of its lines to my present surroundings:

"And I said, 'If there's trout to be found in the world, The hand of an expert may hope for them here.'

But if they were "here," they failed to respond. I tried eddy and current, rapid and pool, deep water and shallow, all to no purpose. With a "Well, this is strange," I reeled up, took my accustomed seat and moved off as disconsolate as a disappointed seeker of office. It was some consolation to learn, as I did soon afterward, that two or three novices had been "sloshing 'round" the rapids and still water, with bait and troll, for several hours before our arrival, and had just left as we landed. They may have caught some fish, but it is a marvel to me often how some of the visitors to these waters ever "get a bite." They use rods large enough for a shark, lines like miniature bed-cords, hooks seemingly made for the nose of the leviathan, with sinkers which fall into the water with a splash which would frighten any

sensible trout "out of his propriety." But, somehow such fellows do lure fish to their ponderous bait; and that they do so is the strongest evidence that could possibly be given of the abundance of trout still remaining in these waters.

But lest, from what I have said of my want of success at this favorite spot on this occasion, some who remember it as pleasantly as I do myself, may heave a sigh of regret at its degeneracy, I had better say right here, although a little out of consecutive order, that on my return three weeks afterward, I found it to be "all my fancy painted it," and all my long previous experience had found it to be. It was getting well on in the afternoon, we had ten miles to row, and I was as nearly satiated with angling as I ever expect to be, but I could not forego the opportunity to make a cast or two as we dashed through the rapids homeward. The first throw brought a fine fish to the surface. I struck him as gently as the law of angling permits, and duly landed him. Another and another and another, in rapid succession, came at my call with a promptness and a rush which renders this last half hour of my three weeks' fishing a very pleasant memory. A dozen, gorgeous in their beauty, lay at my feet with a dozen more "making the water boil" in their eagerness to "get in out of the wet;" but I had no use for them, and with a

merry nod to the trout and a long look at the old rock we left behind us, we reeled up and went on our way rejoicing.

There are several points between these rapids and Bartlett's, five miles distant, where any one unused to these waters, and the habits of trout, would expect success at any season-deep spring holes and cold brook outlets. But it is only a waste of time to fish them before the first or middle of July. Trout have their summer watering places as well as tourists; and it is not until the heated denizens of the towns and cities begin to move off toward Newport and Saratoga that these aristocratic tenants of our inland brooks and rivers leave the rapids and "riffs" for the cooler retreats of deep pools and refreshing spring holes.

This is one of the first lessons I learned in the art of angling. I had ridden fifty miles over a rough road on a hot day in August, to a stream where, according to the universal verdict, trout were as "plenty as blackberries." I placed myself under the guidance of a gentleman whom I supposed "knew the ropes" and upon whom it would be safe to lean. Early on the morning after reaching our destination, following his lead, I plunged into the stream-translucent as the atmosphere -and began to whip right and left, for a rise. Occasionally we would be rewarded by the capture