The weakness of these books is that they soon
fall out of date, as the manufacture of tackle is improved, the art
of angling refined, and the fish in once-famous waters are educated or
exterminated.

Alas, how transient is the fashion of this world, even in angling! The
old manuals with their precise instruction for trimming and painting
trout-rods eighteen feet long, and their painful description of
"oyntments" made of nettle-juice, fish-hawk oil, camphor, cat's fat, or
assafoedita, (supposed to allure the fish,) are altogether behind the
age. Many of the flies described by Charles Cotton and Thomas Barker
seem to have gone out of style among the trout. Perhaps familiarity has
bred contempt. Generation after generation of fish have seen these same
old feathered confections floating on the water, and learned by sharp
experience that they do not taste good. The blase trout demand something
new, something modern. It is for this reason, I suppose, that an
altogether original fly, unheard of, startling, will often do great
execution in an over-fished pool.

Certain it is that the art of angling, in settled regions, is growing
more dainty and difficult. You must cast a longer, lighter line; you
must use finer leaders; you must have your flies dressed on smaller
hooks.

And another thing is certain: in many places (described in the
ancient volumes) where fish were once abundant, they are now like the
shipwrecked sailors in Vergil his Aeneid,--

"rari nantes in gurgite vasto."

The floods themselves are also disappearing. Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman
was telling me, the other day, of the trout-brook that used to run
through the Connecticut village when he nourished a poet's youth.
He went back to visit the stream a few years since, and it was gone,
literally vanished from the face of earth, stolen to make a watersupply
for the town, and used for such base purposes as the washing of clothes
and the sprinkling of streets.

I remember an expedition with my father, some twenty years ago, to Nova
Scotia, whither we set out to realize the hopes kindled by an ANGLER'S
GUIDE written in the early sixties. It was like looking for tall clocks
in the farmhouses around Boston. The harvest had been well gleaned
before our arrival, and in the very place where our visionary author
located his most famous catch we found a summer hotel and a sawmill.

'T is strange and sad, how many regions there are where "the fishing was
wond