me token, the sure-enough angler
is ready to go out next morning, rain or shine, at sunrise.

It is a habit of Unshelled Fish to be in other places, or, possibly,
at your place, but at another time. The guide can never understand
what is wrong. Five days ago, he himself caught more bass than
he could carry home, at that identical rocky point. A man from
La Porte, Indiana, whom he took out the week before, landed a
thirty-eight pound "muskie" in trolling through that same narrow
channel. In the forty years that the guide has lived in the place,
man and boy, he has never known the fishing to be as poor as it
is now. Why, even "ol' Pop Somers" has ceased to fish!

But the real angler continues, regardless of the local sage. He
who has heard the line sing suddenly out of his reel, and, after a
hard-fought hour, scooped a six-pound black bass into the landing
net, weary, but still "game," is not dismayed by bad luck. He who
can cast a fly a hundred feet or more finds pleasure in that, if
not in fishing. Whoever has taken in a muskellunge of any size
will ever after troll patiently, even through masses of weed.
[Page 4]
Whoever has leaned over the side of a sailboat, peering down into
the green, crystalline waters of the Gulf, and seen, twenty feet
down, the shimmering sides of a fifteen-pound red grouper, firmly
hooked and coming, will never turn over sleepily, for a last nap,
when his door is almost broken in at 5 A.M.

And, fish or no fish, there are compensations. Into a day of
heart-breaking and soul-sickening toil, when all the world goes
wrong, must sometimes come the vision of a wooded shore, with tiny
dark wavelets singing softly on the rocks and a robin piping cheerily
on the topmost bough of a maple. Tired eyes look past the musty ledger
and the letter files to a tiny sapphire lake, set in hills, with
the late afternoon light streaming in glory from the far mountains
beyond.

It may be cold up North, but down in the Gulf they are fishing--scudding
among the Florida Keys in a little white sailboat, landing for lunch
on a strand as snowy as the northern streets, where the shimmering
distances of white sand are paved with shell and pearl, and the tide
thrums out its old song under the palms. And fish? Two-hundred
and fifty pounds is the average day's catch for a small sailboat
cruising among the Florida Keys.

Yet, when all is said and done, the catching of fish is a matter
of luck--a gambler's chance,
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