ed it. I coveted
three or four good trout to top off with,--that was all. So I tied on a
couple of flies, and began to fish the alders, wading waist deep in the
rapidly rising water, down the long green tunnel under the curving
boughs. The brook fairly smoked with the rain, by this time, but when
did one fail to get at least three or four trout out of this best half
mile of the lower brook? Yet I had no luck I tried one fly after
another, and then, as a forlorn hope,--though it sometimes has a magic
of its own,--I combined a brown hackle for the tail fly with a twisting
worm on the dropper. Not a rise! I thought of E. sitting patiently in
the saw mill, and I fished more conscientiously than ever.

"Venture as warily, use the same skill,
Do your best, whether winning or losing it,
If you choose to play!--is my principle."

Even those lines, which by some subtle telepathy of the trout brook
murmur themselves over and over to me in the waning hours of an unlucky
day, brought now no consolation. There was simply not one fish to be
had, to any fly in the book, out of that long, drenching, darkening
tunnel. At last I climbed out of the brook, by the bridge. R. was
sitting on the fence, his neck and ears carefully turtled under his
coat collar, the smoke rising and the rain dripping from the inverted
bowl of his pipe. He did not seem to be worrying about his rheumatism.

"What luck?" he asked.

"None at all," I answered morosely. "Sorry to keep you waiting."

"That's all right," remarked R. "What do you think I 've been doing? I
've been fishing out of the saw-mill window just to kill time. There
was a patch of floating sawdust there,--kind of unlikely place for
trout, anyway,--but I thought I'd put on a worm and let him crawl
around a little." He opened his creel as he spoke. "But I did n't look
for a pair of 'em," he added. And there, on top of his smaller fish,
were as pretty a pair of three-quarter-pound brook trout as were ever
basketed.

"I 'm afraid you got pretty wet," said R. kindly.

"I don't mind that," I replied. And I didn't. What I minded was the
thought of an hour's vain wading in that roaring stream, whipping
it with fly after fly, while R., the foreordained fisherman, was
sitting comfortably in a sawmill, and derricking that pair of
three-quarter-pounders in through the window! I had ventured more
warily than he, and used, if not the same skill, at least the best
skill at my command. My consci