or
breakfast, it is wiser to choose the surest bait. The crackle of the
fish in the frying-pan will atone for any theoretical defect in your
method. But to choose the surest bait, and then to bring back no fish,
is unforgivable. Forsake Plato if you must,--but you may do so only at
the price of justifying yourself in the terms of Aristotelian
arithmetic. The college president who abandoned his college in order to
run a cotton mill was free to make his own choice of a calling; but he
was never pardoned for bankrupting the mill. If one is bound to be a
low man rather than an impractical idealist, he should at least make
sure of his vulgar success.

Is all this but a disguised defense of pot-hunting? No. There is no
possible defense of pot-hunting, whether it be upon a trout brook or in
the stock market. Against fish or men, one should play the game fairly.
Yet for that matter some of the most skillful fly-fishermen I have
known were pot-hunters at heart, and some of the most prosaic-looking
merchants were idealists compared to whom Shelley was but a dreaming
boy. All depends upon the spirit with which one makes his venture. I
recall a boy of five who gravely watched his father tramp off after
rabbits,--gun on shoulder and beagle in leash. Thereupon he shouldered
a wooden sword, and dragging his reluctant black kitten by a string,
sallied forth upon the dusty Vermont road "to get a lion for
breakfast." That is the true sporting temper! Let there be but a fine
idealism in the quest, and the particular object is unessential. "A
true fisherman's happiness," says Mr. Cleveland, "is not dependent upon
his luck." It depends upon his heart.

No doubt all amateur fishing is but "play,"--as the psychologists
soberly term it: not a necessary, but a freely assumed activity, born
of surplusage of vitality. Nobody, not even a carpenter wearied of his
job, has to go fishing unless he wants to. He may indeed find himself
breakfast-less in camp, and obliged to betake himself to the
brook,--but then he need not have gone into the woods at all. Yet if
he does decide to fish, let him

"Venture as warily, use the same skill,
Do his best, ..."

whatever variety of tackle he may choose. He can be a whole-souled
sportsman with the poorest equipment, or a mean "trout-hog" with the
most elaborate.

Only, in the name of gentle Izaak himself, let him be a _complete_
angler; and let the man be a passionate amateur of all the arts of
life