annot be indefinitely
prolonged.

Thank the gods my good shipmate and travelling companion A. was cheery
to the backbone, as, in truth, a good-looking fellow of fourteen stone,
and with nothing to do but travel about the world and enjoy himself,
ought to be. Being no angler, it was all the same to him whether fish
sulked or frolicked; his patience was as inexhaustible as his
amiability, and when my questioning of Ben about fish and fishing
ceased by force of self-exhaustion, A. would quietly cut in with
reminiscences of his recent run out to Colorado, former campings in the
Rockies, adventures in Japan and all parts of Europe, and personal
acquaintance with the States and the Dominion. The trouble that dear
A. saved me in looking after baggage and tickets, the reliance I felt
in his fighting weight and well set-up body, the placid smile with
which he took life whatever it might be, were invaluable to me; and,
though he accepted the ill-luck of our forenoon as only what he
expected, as being, indeed, the ordinary outcome of most fishing
expeditions, my chief desire was that he should have the bliss of
landing a good fish. For myself I was not hopeful, and we went
fishless ashore in the hot sun at mid-day, glad to release ourselves
from the cramped positions in which we had been enduring the
discomforts of that wretched skiff.

In the afternoon we went out again. What would I not have given for a
boat really fit for the work--a steady, square-sterned craft, on the
floor of which one might have stood firm, casting right and left, and
able to take every advantage of those weeds which now made trailing a
positive nuisance? Ben's theory was that twelve yards of line were
enough for his style of business; that though a fish might be
temporarily scared aside by the passage of the cockle-shell, it would
be just about restored to quiet when the spoon came along, and more
likely to dash at it than with a greater length of line. Of course, I
stuck to our English ways, and kept my phantom engaged at a distance,
when possible, of never less than thirty yards. In course of time
Ben's objections and protests were once for all silenced; he gave me up
as an opinionated ass, whom it was waste of time to trouble about any
more.

"Smack, smack," at last--a momentary sensation at the rod-top. How the
fish could have struck at my phantom, doubled up the soleskin body,
without, however, touching a single hook of the deadly trio of