o the sneering scoundrel, to see what he would make of it;
and he not only half-filled my basket in an hour, but literally taught
me to kill two trouts with my own hand."

Thus ancient and well-authenticated is the superstition of the angling
powers of the barefooted country-boy,--in fiction.

Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, in that valuable but over-capitalized book,
MY NOVEL, makes use of Fishing for Allegorical Purposes. The episode of
John Burley and the One-eyed Perch not only points a Moral but adorns
the Tale.

In the works of R. D. Blackmore, angling plays a less instructive but a
pleasanter part. It is closely interwoven with love. There is a magical
description of trout-fishing on a meadow-brook in ALICE LORRAINE. And
who that has read LORNA DOONE, (pity for the man or woman that knows not
the delight of that book!) can ever forget how young John Ridd dared
his way up the gliddery water-slide, after loaches, and found Lorna in a
fair green meadow adorned with flowers, at the top of the brook?

I made a little journey into the Doone Country once, just to see that
brook and to fish in it. The stream looked smaller, and the water-slide
less terrible, than they seemed in the book. But it was a mighty pretty
place after all; and I suppose that even John Ridd, when he came back to
it in after years, found it shrunken a little.

All the streams were larger in our boyhood than they are now, except,
perhaps, that which flows from the sweetest spring of all, the fountain
of love, which John Ridd discovered beside the Bagworthy River,--and I,
on the willow-shaded banks of the Patapsco, where the Baltimore girls
fish for gudgeons,--and you? Come, gentle reader, is there no stream
whose name is musical to you, because of a hidden spring of love that
you once found on its shore? The waters of that fountain never fail, and
in them alone we taste the undiminished fulness of immortal youth.

The stories of William Black are enlivened with fish, and he knew,
better than most men, how they should be taken. Whenever he wanted to
get two young people engaged to each other, all other devices failing,
he sent them out to angle together. If it had not been for fishing,
everything in A PRINCESS OF THULE and WHITE HEATHER would have gone
wrong.

But even men who have been disappointed in love may angle for solace or
diversion. I have known some old bachelors who fished excellently well;
and others I have known who could find, and give