arieties, subgenuses of the above; stick to that. Some
writing fellow divided all the women into good-uns and bad-uns. But as a
conscientious stickler for truth, I must say that both in trout as in
women, I have found myself faced with most puzzling varieties, that were
a tantalizing blending of several qualities. I then resolved to study
them on my own account. I pursued the Eternal Feminine in a spirit of
purely scientific investigation. I knew you'd laugh sceptically at that,
but it's a fact. I was impartial in my selection of subjects for
observation--French, German, Spanish, as well as the home product.
Nothing in petticoats escaped me. I devoted myself to the freshest
_ingenue_ as well as the experienced widow of three departed; and I may
as well confess that the more I saw of her, the less I understood her.
But I think they understood me. They refused to take me _au serieux_.
When they weren't fleecing me, they were interested in the state of my
soul (I preferred the former), but all humbugged me equally, so I gave
them up. I took to rod and gun instead, _pro salute animae_; it's
decidedly safer. I have scoured every country in the globe; indeed I can
say that I have shot and fished in woods and waters where no other white
man, perhaps ever dropped a beast or played a fish before. There is no
life like the life of a free wanderer, and no lore like the lore one
gleans in the great book of nature. But one must have freed one's spirit
from the taint of the town before one can even read the alphabet of its
mystic meaning.

What has this to do with the glove? True, not much, and yet it has a
connection--it accounts for me.

Well, for twelve years I have followed the impulses of the wandering
spirit that dwells in me. I have seen the sun rise in Finland and gild
the Devil's Knuckles as he sank behind the Drachensberg. I have caught
the barba and the gamer yellow fish in the Vaal river, taken muskelunge
and black-bass in Canada, thrown a fly over _guapote_ and _cavallo_ in
Central American lakes, and choked the monster eels of the Mauritius
with a cunningly faked-up duckling. But I have been shy as a chub at the
shadow of a woman.

Well, it happened last year I came back on business--another confounded
legacy; end of June too, just as I was off to Finland. But Messrs.
Thimble and Rigg, the highly respectable firm who look after my affairs,
represented that I owed it to others, whom I kept out of their share of
the le