d a trick with a detachable float, made from a quill and a tiny
piece of cork, that brought him many a fish from the centre of a
mill-pond. He knew the best baits for every season,--worms, white
grubs, striped minnows, miller's thumbs, bumble-bees, grasshoppers,
young field-mice,--and he knew where to find them.

For it must be confessed that Cotton Mather was a confirmed
bait-fisherman. Confession is not the word that he would have used with
reference to the fact; he would have called it a declaration of
principles, and would have maintained that he was a follower of the
best, the most skilful, the most productive, the fairest, the truly
Apostolic method of fishing.

Jones, on the other hand, was not a little shocked when he discovered
in the course of conversation that his colleague, who was in many
respects such a good sportsman, was addicted to fishing with bait. For
his own angling education had been acquired in a different
school,--among the clear streams of England, the open rivers of
Scotland, the carefully preserved waters of Long Island. He had been
taught that the artificial fly was the proper lure for a true angler to
use.

For coarse fish like perch and pike, a bait was permissible. For
middle-class fish, like bass, which would only rise to the fly during a
brief and uncertain season, a trolling-spoon or an artificial minnow
might be allowed. But for fish whose blood, though cold, was
noble,--for game fish of undoubted rank like the salmon and the trout,
the true angler must use only the lightest possible tackle, the most
difficult possible methods, the cleanest and prettiest possible
lure,--to wit, the artificial fly. Moreover, he added his opinion that
in the long run, taking all sorts of water and weather together, and
fishing through the season, a man can take more trout with the fly than
with the bait,--that is, of course, if he understands the art of
fly-fishing.

You perceive at once that here was a very pretty ground for conflict
between the two men, after the ecclesiastical battle had been called
off. Their community of zeal as anglers only intensified their radical
opposition as to the authoritative and orthodox mode of angling. In the
close season, when the practice of their art was forbidden, they
discussed its theory with vigour; and many were the wit-combats between
these two champions, to which the Samaritans listened in the
drug-store-and-post-office that served them in place of a Merma