things than can educate and engage our powers. This is just as if the ear, not content with hearing the tones it can distinguish, wished for notes too bass or too treble to be audible, or even desired drum-cracking thunders and loud stunning, paralysing noises, which would actually destroy it. Possession is sternly relative to need, and to power. This rule, applied to angling, enables one to laugh at the gulling over-elaboration of the tackle makers' catalogues. Do the deluded buyers of the nine, twelve, twenty, or forty-guinea rods fish better or catch more than does the keeper with his half guinea one? I am quite willing to believe that Tarpon, Masheer, and other foreign creatures, require special tackle, though I much doubt whether it is worth while to go to Mexico to catch costly herrings, which are indistinguishable from our domestic sharks when on the run. Let us grant that a salmon fisher cannot equip himself efficiently for less than ten pounds, without counting clothes, though my Canadian friends roar with laughter at such pomposity. Suppose that the angler for trout and grayling might reach perfection in his art for five pounds judiciously spent upon properties; and the water hunter after meaner game could catch any fish in his beat with fifty shillings worth of equipment, then it is not either wise or free to expend pounds where shillings would do equally well. It is simple servility to do so out of unappreciated deference to Sir Midas or Colonel Rupee. A ten pound note can go with ease upon a single Dubbing book of assorted materials for flies, at these pleasant rates: Argus tail, 10s. per feather, Macaw, 1s. per inch; but equally efficacious flies can be made from the farmyard for nothing, or if their heads revolve, for a few pence. If not I will never again trust a Scot, as informant. From one instance gather suspicion of the whole edifice of human folly. Sir Edward and Eleazar, two friends, fished together for coarse fish for a whole season. The one bought (1) a couple of 12-foot pair rods with pneumatic but tons Price £2 15 0 (2) and a lockfast jointed, cork handled thing of some phenomenal lightness with vir tue 4 16 6 (3) A creel (meant to carry a grand piano, dress clothes and the whole works of Duns Scotus) (4) A landing net (5) A hold-all tackle case Three reels of untold and unguessed merit, 30/-, 14/- (7) Floats: luminous, scintil- (8) Lines: taper, floating, sinking, whistling, etc (9) Hooks, casts, flights, swivels, plummets, knives, balances, flask, fly books, boxes, winders, phantoms, spoons, chub flies, imitation beetles, booms 1 18 0 0 12 0 2 12 0 2 15 6 0 19 2 2 13 0 (say) 6 0 0 600 Total £25 1 2 In addition to these Sir Edward dressed the part, and looked magnificent beyond words in a suit which was two tints deeper than his manly bronzed cheek, and half-atint below the gloss of his admired mous tache. (He is not a literary man and will never see this, so one can write at ease). As to his legs they were as magnificent in shape as an archbishop's and in colour reminded the reflective of the Liber Studiorum. Poor Eleazar, on the contrary, shambled out in a green coat, with (1) A small pannier (2) Two rods; one bought at a postman (4) Three reels, 1/-, 1/6, and 2/6 (5) One plaited line, 3/6, and 0 26 036 026 046 three meaner ones at 4d. . (6) Half-a-crown's worth of hooks, and gut hanks and sundries 026 Total £1 06 His floats were relics of a forgotten past. His baits were carried in a kettle or in mustard and tobacco tins, twisted in old proof sheets, and stuffed into his bulging side pockets. His grizzled hair, botched boots and homely aspect made him an object of derision to the cowboy who called in Crummy from the water mead. The very drunkards, had there been any there, would have made. songs upon him, as they did upon the psalmist. Personally I never could understand what either of the men had in common with the other to draw them thus together, and yet they fished our neighbourhood with tameless ardour and amity: and since they usually met close to my house, I made it a habit to call out a cheery good morning and to ask them how each had fared last time. I noted the answers carefully down in a book. At the end of the season Sir Edward had taken but one fish to Eleazar's three, and only one fifth of the total weight of their joint catch. Sir Edward is a thoroughly good-natured fellow and assures me that his friend is both clever and lucky at the craft. Eleazar, on the contrary, thinks that his constant success is rather due to his homespun tackle and careless neglect of the brilliant and glittering notions of the shops, which catch nothing but the angler's guineas. He begs me to consider that in the matter of pike, he has often had to call in his friend's landing net at least "to save time," and that one of his rods has twice been |