, with empty bag and
a feeling of damp discouragement.

There was still an hour or so of daylight, and a beautiful place to fish
where the stream poured swirling out into the lake. A rise, and a large
one, though rather slow, awakened my hopes. Another rise, evidently made
by a heavy fish, made me certain that virtue was about to be rewarded.
The third time the hook went home. I felt the solid weight of the fish
against the spring of the rod, and that curious thrill which runs up the
line and down the arm, changing, somehow or other, into a pleasurable
sensation of excitement as it reaches the brain. But it was only for a
moment; and then came that foolish, feeble shaking of the line from
side to side which tells the angler that he has hooked a great, big,
leather-mouthed chub--a fish which Izaak Walton says "the French esteem
so mean as to call him Un Vilain." Was it for this that I had come to
the country of Francis Joseph?

I took off the flies and put on one of those phantom minnows which have
immortalised the name of a certain Mr. Brown. The minnow swung on a long
line as the boat passed back and forth across the current, once, twice,
three times--and on the fourth circle there was a sharp strike. The rod
bent almost double, and the reel sang shrilly to the first rush of the
fish. He ran; he doubled; he went to the bottom and sulked; he tried to
go under the boat; he did all that a game fish can do, except leaping.
After twenty minutes he was tired enough to be lifted gently into
the boat by a hand slipped around his gills, and there he was, a
lachsforelle of three pounds' weight: small pointed head; silver sides
mottled with dark spots; square, powerful tail and large fins--a fish
not unlike the land-locked salmon of the Saguenay, but more delicate.

Half an hour later he was lying on the grass in front of the Inn. The
waiters paused, with their hands full of dishes, to look at him; and the
landlord called his guests, including my didactic tourists, to observe
the superiority of the trout of the Grundlsee. The maids also came to
look; and the buxom cook, with her spotless apron and bare arms akimbo,
was drawn from her kitchen, and pledged her culinary honour that such a
pracht-kerl should be served up in her very best style. The angler who
is insensible to this sort of indirect flattery through his fish does
not exist. Even the most indifferent of men thinks more favourably of
people who know a good trout when t