ract a fish to the hooks. No; one
casts.

Now, I have learned to cast fairly well. On the lawn at home, or in the
middle of a ten-acre lot, cleared, or the center of a lake, I can put
out quite a lot of line. In one cast out of three, I can drop a fly so
that it appears to be committing suicide--which is the correct way. But
in a thicket I am lost. I hold the woman's record for getting the hook
in my hair or the lobe of the Little Boy's ear. I have hung fish high in
trees more times than phonographs have hanged Danny Deever. I can, under
such circumstances (i.e., the thicket), leave camp with a rod, four
six-foot leaders, an expensive English line, and a smile, and return an
hour later with a six-inch trout, a bandaged hand, a hundred and eighty
mosquito bites, no leaders, and no smile.

So we fished little that first evening, and, on the discovery that
candles had been left out of the cook's outfit, we retired early to our
bough beds, which were, as it happened that night, of class A.

There was a deer-lick on our camp-ground there at Bridge Creek, and
during the night deer came down and strayed through the camp. One of the
guides saw a black bear also. We saw nothing. Some day I shall write an
article called: "Wild Animals I Have Missed."

We had made fourteen miles the first day, with a late start. It was not
bad, but the next day we determined to do better. At five o'clock we
were up, and at five-thirty tents were down and breakfast under way. We
had had a visitor the night before--that curious anomaly, a young
hermit. He had been a very well-known pugilist in the light-weight class
and, his health failing, he had sought the wilderness. There he had
lived for seven years alone.

We asked him if he never cared to see people. But he replied that trees
were all the company he wanted. Deer came and browsed around his tiny
shack there in the woods. All the trout he could use played in his front
garden. He had a dog and a horse, and he wanted nothing else. He came to
see us off the next morning, and I think we amused him. We seemed to
need so much. He stared at our thirty-one horses, sixteen of them packed
with things he had learned to live without. But I think he rather hated
to see us go. We had brought a little excitement into his quiet life.

The first bough bed had been a failure. For--note you--I had not then
learned of the bough bed _de luxe_. This information, which I have given
you so freely, dear reader, w