ts of sharp stones and patches of heather, but once on the
vantage ground the swish of a trout rod sounded there for the first time
since the dawn of Creation.

[Illustration: More than once while I clung to the chance projection
... I regretted making the fool-hardy attempt]

There was an audible splash at my first cast. My, how that reel did
sing! Before I realized it, my fish had reached rapid water and taken
out a dangerous amount of line; still I dared not check him too severely
among the sharp rocks and swift waters, so I ran along the bank,
stumbling over stones, but managing to avail myself of every opportunity
to wind in the line until I had the satisfaction of seeing enough line
on my reel to prepare me for possible sudden dashes and emergencies.

Ah! that was a glorious fight, and when at last I was able to steer my
tired fish into shallow water I saw there were three of them, one lusty
trout on each of my three flies. I had no landing net so I gently slid
the almost exhausted fish onto a gravel bar and as I did so I
experienced one of those delightful thrills which comes to a fellow's
lot but once or twice in a life-time. But it was not because I had
captured three at a strike, for I have done that before and since, but I
thrilled because they were not only a new and strange kind of trout, but
they were of the color and sheen of newly minted gold. Never before had
any man seen such trout.

I have since been informed that I had blundered on to water inhabited by
the rarest of all game fish, the so-called golden trout, which has since
been discovered and which scientists declare to be pre-glacier fish left
by some accident of nature to exist in a new world in which all their
original contemporaries have long been extinct.

Think of it! Fish which had never seen an artificial fly nor had any
family traditions of experiences with them. It is little wonder that
they would jump at a brown hackle, a professor or even a gaudy salmon
fly. Why they would jump at a chicken feather! They were ready and eager
to bite at any sort of bunco game I saw fit to play upon them. They were
veritable hayseeds of the trout family, but when they felt the hook in
their lips, the wisest trout in the world could not show a craftier nor
half as plucky a fight. They would leap from the water like
small-mouthed bass and by shaking their heads, try to throw off the
hateful hook.

The constant vigorous exercise of leaping water-falls