this action that the fishermen are just men,
after all, and not a woodland variety of Peter Pan, though they
merely bob up on the pond margin, or perhaps well out on the ice,
loaded with their traps and tools. One never sees them coming
through the wood or down the street, or getting off trolley cars
or out of carryalls, these fishermen, they just bob up, which
would seem to prove a mystic origin; though of course they are
just folks and somebody knows them, as I have said.

Soon the air resounds with the xylophone music of their chopping,
the solid surf ace vibrating beneath the blows of the axe and
giving forth a clear tintinnabulation which is most delightful to
the ear. It is not all xylophonic, but there is in it, too, the
clink of musical glasses and also a certain weirdness, a goblin
withal that seems to belong with the mystery surrounding the
origin of pickerel fishermen. It is a sound to delight the ear and
linger pleasantly in the memory like the sleigh-bell tinkling of
ice crystals in a frozen wood. Stirred by this, or perhaps by the
beat of the risen sun on its surface, the pond itself begins to
caper a bit, musically, roaring in basso profundo a morning song
of its own. The result is grotesque in the extreme. I once heard a
big-chested man sing "Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep," while his
accompanist jigged out an accompaniment on the highest octave to
be found on the keyboard of the piano. The pond and the fishermen
seem to be doing something like this.

*****

To such quaint music the traps are set, bits of lath standing on
the edge of the hole and bearing attached to the line a red
flannel flag which the biting fish will strike and carry into the
depths with him when he goes off to swallow the bait. The
fishermen understand well the ways of the aristocrat pickerel when
he swallows a proletariat minnow. No lordly capitalist ever took
in a plebeian inventor with more grace--and finality. Often the
flag just drops from the support and lies on the surface of the
water while the two get acquainted. The pickerel has the minnow,
but his grip is not what he wants. He is particular about the way
he swallows a little one, as if he feared some impending Sherman
act. So, having got his fish, he waits to turn him so that the
victim may head down and seem to go of his own volition into the
interior department. Not until then does he run out the rest of
the line. If the attorney general fisherman attempts to take