dows;
doubtless their food is more abundant there, and, usually, the good
hiding-places are more numerous. As soon as you strike a meadow the
character of the creek changes: it goes slower and lies deeper; it
tarries to enjoy the high, cool banks and to half hide beneath them;
it loves the willows, or rather the willows love it and shelter it
from the sun; its spring runs are kept cool by the overhanging
grass, and the heavy turf that faces its open banks is not cut away
by the sharp hoofs of the grazing cattle. Then there are the
bobolinks and the starlings and the meadowlarks, always interested
spectators of the angler; there are also the marsh marigolds, the
buttercups, or the spotted lilies, and the good angler is always an
interested spectator of them. In fact, the patches of meadow land
that lie in the angler's course are like the happy experiences in
his own life, or like the fine passages in the poem he is reading;
the pasture oftener contains the shallow and monotonous places. In
the small streams the cattle scare the fish, and soil their element
and break down their retreats under the banks. Woodland alternates
the best with meadow: the creek loves to burrow under the roots of a
great tree, to scoop out a pool after leaping over the prostrate
trunk of one, and to pause at the foot of a ledge of moss-covered
rocks, with ice-cold water dripping down. How straight the current
goes for the rock! Note its corrugated, muscular appearance; it
strikes and glances off, but accumulates, deepens with well-defined
eddies above and to one side; on the edge of these the trout lurk
and spring upon their prey.

The angler learns that it is generally some obstacle or hindrance
that makes a deep place in the creek, as in a brave life; and his
ideal brook is one that lies in deep, well-defined banks, yet makes
many a shift from right to left, meets with many rebuffs and
adventures, hurled back upon itself by rocks, waylaid by snags and
trees, tripped up by precipices, but sooner or later reposing under
meadow banks, deepening and eddying beneath bridges, or prosperous
and strong in some level stretch of cultivated land with great elms
shading it here and there.

But I early learned that from almost any stream in a trout country
the true angler could take trout, and that the great secret was
this, that, whatever bait you used, worm, grasshopper, grub, or fly,
there was one thing you must always put upon your hook, namely, your