to you with its native
accent. Here you see its secret charms unconsciously disclosed. The
attraction of angling for all the ages of man, from the cradle to the
grave, lies in its uncertainty. 'Tis an affair of luck.

No amount of preparation in the matter of rods and lines and hooks
and lures and nets and creels can change its essential character.
No excellence of skill in casting the delusive fly or adjusting the
tempting bait upon the hook can make the result secure. You may reduce
the chances, but you cannot eliminate them. There are a thousand points
at which fortune may intervene. The state of the weather, the height of
the water, the appetite of the fish, the presence or absence of other
anglers--all these indeterminable elements enter into the reckoning of
your success. There is no combination of stars in the firmament by which
you can forecast the piscatorial future. When you go a-fishing, you just
take your chances; you offer yourself as a candidate for anything that
may be going; you try your luck.

There are certain days that are favourites among anglers, who regard
them as propitious for the sport. I know a man who believes that the
fish always rise better on Sunday than on any other day in the week. He
complains bitterly of this supposed fact, because his religious scruples
will not allow him to take advantage of it. He confesses that he has
sometimes thought seriously of joining the Seventh-Day Baptists.

Among the Pennsylvania Dutch, in the Alleghany Mountains, I have found
a curious tradition that Ascension Day is the luckiest in the year
for fishing. On that morning the district school is apt to be thinly
attended, and you must be on the stream very early if you do not wish to
find wet footprints on the stones ahead of you.

But in fact, all these superstitions about fortunate days are idle and
presumptuous. If there were such days in the calendar, a kind and firm
Providence would never permit the race of man to discover them. It
would rob life of one of its principal attractions, and make fishing
altogether too easy to be interesting.

Fisherman's luck is so notorious that it has passed into a proverb.
But the fault with that familiar saying is that it is too short and too
narrow to cover half the variations of the angler's possible experience.
For if his luck should be bad, there is no portion of his anatomy,
from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, that may not be
thoroughly wet. Bu