peculiarly to my fish stories. He writes me a satiric, doubting
letter--then shuts up his office and rushes for some river or lake.
Will Dilg, the famous fly-caster, upon receipt of my communication,
wrote me a nine-page prose-poem epic about the only fish in the
world--black-bass. Professor Kellogg always falls ill and takes a
vacation, during which he writes me that I have not mental capacity to
appreciate my luck.

These fellows will illustrate how my friends receive angling news from
me. I ought to have sense enough to keep my stories for publication. I
strongly suspect that their strange reaction to my friendly feeling is
because I have caught more and larger black-bass than they ever saw.
Some day I will go back to the swift streams and deep lakes, where the
bronze-backs live, and fish with my friends, and then they will realize
that I never lie about the sport and beauty and wonder of the great
outdoors.

Every season for the five years that I have been visiting Avalon there
has been a run of tuna. But the average weight was from sixty to
ninety-five pounds. Until this season only a very few big tuna had been
taken. The prestige of the Tuna Club, the bragging of the old members,
the gossip of the boatmen--all tend to make a fisherman feel small until
he has landed a big one. Come to think of it, considering the years of
the Tuna Club fame, not so very many anglers have captured a blue-button
tuna. I vowed I did not care in particular about it, but whenever we ran
across a school of tuna I acted like a boy.

A good many tuna fell to my rod during these seasons. During the
present season, to be exact, I caught twenty-two. This is no large
number for two months' fishing. Boschen caught about one hundred; Jump,
eighty-four; Hooper, sixty. Among these tuna I fought were three that
stand out strikingly. One seventy-three-pounder took fifty minutes of
hard fighting to subdue; a ninety-one-pounder took one hour fifty; and
the third, after two hours and fifty minutes, got away. It seems, and
was proved later, that the number fifty figured every time I hooked one
of the long, slim, hard-fighting male tuna.

Beginning late in June, for six weeks tuna were caught almost every day,
some days a large number being taken. But big ones were scarce. Then one
of the Tuna Club anglers began to bring in tuna that weighed well over
one hundred pounds. This fact inspired all the anglers. He would slip
out early in the morning and r