ountains is where I mostly do my fishing.

"I'm just sort of hanging round now waiting for the snow to move out
so's I can go up there and start fishing.

"Well, sirs, it's funny, ain't it, the way luck will run fishing? Oncet
when I was living up there I fished stiddy, day in and day out, for two
seasons and never got a bite that you could rightly call a bite. And
then all of a sudden one afternoon the luck switched and in exactly
forty-five minutes by the watch--by this here very watch I'm carrying
now in my pocket--I ketched seventy-two of them big old black basses out
of one hole; and they averaged five pounds apiece!"

We looked at one another silently. A total of seventy-two five-pound
bass in three-quarters of an hour seemed a little too much to be taken
as a first dose from a strange practitioner. And it was hard to believe
they had all been basses; if only for the sake of variety there should
have been at least one barytone. We felt that we needed time for
reflection--and digestion.

Evidently realizing this, one of our number undertook to throw himself
into the breach. As I recollect, this volunteer was the fat coffin
drummer from Des Moines who had the round, smooth face and the round,
bald head, and wore the fuzzy green hat with the bow at the back. I
think he wore the bow there purposely--it simplified matters so when you
were trying to decide which side of his head his face grew on. He heaved
a pensive sigh out of his system and remarked upon the clearness of the
air in these parts.

"You're right there, mister," broke in the button-nosed man, snapping
him up instantly. "The air is tolerable clear here today; but you
oughter to see the air up in the mountains! Why, it's so clear up there
it would make this here hill-country air look like a fog. I remember
oncet I was browsing along a cliff up in that country, toting my
fishpole, and I happened to look over the bluff--just so--and down below
I saw a hole in the creek that was just crawling with them big
trouts--steel-head trouts and rainbow trouts. I could see the spots on
their sides and their fins waving, and their gills working up and down.

"I figured out that it was fully a hundred feet down to the water and
the water would natchelly be tolerable deep; so I let all my line run
off the reel, a hundred and sixty feet of it; and I fished and fished
and fished--and didn't get a strike, let alone a nibble. Yet I could
look over and see all these hungr