distinctly, lying perfectly still and within reach. Then he makes a
swift movement, like that of a mower swinging the scythe, takes the fish
into the net head-first, and lands him without a slip.

I felt sure that Ferdinand was going to do the trick in precisely this
way with my ouananiche. Just at the right instant he made one quick,
steady swing of the arms, and--the head of the net broke clean off the
handle and went floating away with the fish in it!

All seemed to be lost. But Ferdinand was equal to the occasion. He
seized a long, crooked stick that lay in a pile of driftwood on the
shore, sprang into the water up to his waist, caught the net as it
drifted past, and dragged it to land, with the ultimate ouananiche, the
prize of the season, still glittering through its meshes.

This is the story of my most thrilling moment as an angler.

But which was the moment of the deepest thrill?

Was it when the huckleberry bush saved me from a watery grave, or when
the log rolled under my feet and started down the river? Was it when the
fish rose, or when the net broke, or when the long stick captured it?

No, it was none of these. It was when the Kri-karee sat with his legs
tucked under him on the brink of the stream. That was the turning-point.
The fortunes of the day depended on the comparative quickness of the
reflex action of his neural ganglia and mine. That was the thrilling
moment.

I see it now. A crisis is really the commonest thing in the world. The
reason why life sometimes seems dull to us is because we do not perceive
the importance and the excitement of getting bait.

TALKABILITY

A PRELUDE AND THEME WITH VARIATIONS

"He praises a meditative life, and with evident sincerity:
but we feel that he liked nothing so well as good talk."

--JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL: Walton.

I. PRELUDE--ON AN OLD, FOOLISH MAXIM

The inventor of the familiar maxim that "fishermen must not talk" is
lost in the mists of antiquity, and well deserves his fate. For a more
foolish rule, a conventionality more obscure and aimless in its tyranny,
was never imposed upon an innocent and honourable occupation, to
diminish its pleasure and discount its profits. Why, in the name of all
that is genial, should anglers go about their harmless sport in stealthy
silence like conspirators, or sit together in a boat, dumb, glum, and
penitential, like naughty schoolboys on the bench of disgrace? 'Tis
an Omorcan su