oods which I have in my notebook, I will back my selected half-dozen
of our English, Irish, and Scotch sea-trout and lake flies against the
best of the Orvis favourites.

Philadelphia, which, from my all too passing and superficial view of
it, has the most English-looking suburbs of any city I have seen, does
not count for much with the angler. There are some streams in
Pennsylvania which yield plenty of small trout, and if you know the
proper places, at the head waters and elsewhere, the Delaware and
Susquehannah rivers, which, in crossing them, I was assured contained
no game fish at all, have very fair black bass streams, while there are
what we should rank as burn trout in most of the tributaries tumbling
down through the woods and the mountains and hills. As for salmon, I
may here remark that I could only hear of one pool in the United States
where Salmo salar can be caught. There are heaps of salmon on the
Pacific slope, but they are not salar, and not sportive in the rivers
to the fly. This pool is the watery fretwork of a dam where the tidal
portion of a fifty-mile length of river is ended, and the salmon are
therefore caught in brackish water always with the fly. Seventy were
taken there the previous year.

Washington--the city still of magnificent distances, though it is
gradually filling in the blanks, and is looked forward to as the coming
city of the leisure and pleasure classes, who shall live unpolluted by
the rank snobbery of New York fashion, the chicanery of Wall Street,
and the genius of the almighty dollar, which rules in other
cities--Washington, I regret to find, is no better for the angler than
Philadelphia. But you get bass fishing in the historic Potomac, and
small trout in the hill country of Maryland and Virginia.

On the face of it, Chicago, with its surroundings of prairie and lake,
would not tempt the angler. Yet it is in this respect most fortunately
placed, and I made the acquaintance of many anglers of the right sort,
and enthusiastic enough for anything. It is a marvellous city, of
really magical growth and extent, and the energy of the people is
appalling. But it is nonsense to call it magnificent in anything but
its enterprise and the size of its buildings towering to the sky, and
not beautiful. Moreover, it is smoky. Hence the anglers are numerous;
they have many incentives to flee from it. The lake yields no angling
for the skilled rod. The boys and loafers get, howev