ence was clear, but so was his; and he
had had the drier skin and the greater magnanimity and the biggest
fish besides. There is much to be said, in a world like ours, for
taking the world as you find it and for fishing with a worm.

One's memories of such fishing, however agreeable they may be, are not
to be identified with a defense of the practice. Yet, after all, the
most effective defense of worm-fishing is the concrete recollection of
some brook that could be fished best or only in that way, or the image
of a particular trout that yielded to the temptation of an angleworm
after you had flicked fly after fly over him in vain. Indeed, half the
zest of brook fishing is in your campaign for "individuals,"--as the
Salvation Army workers say,--not merely for a basketful of fish qua
fish, but for a series of individual trout which your instinct tells
you ought to lurk under that log or be hovering in that ripple. How to
get him, by some sportsmanlike process, is the question. If he will
rise to some fly in your book, few fishermen will deny that the fly is
the more pleasurable weapon. Dainty, luring, beautiful toy, light as
thistle-down, falling where you will it to fall, holding when the
leader tightens and sings like the string of a violin, the artificial
fly represents the poetry of angling. Given the gleam of early morning
on some wide water, a heavy trout breaking the surface as he curves and
plunges, with the fly holding well, with the right sort of rod in your
fingers, and the right man in the other end of the canoe, and you
perceive how easy is that Emersonian trick of making the pomp of
emperors ridiculous.

But angling's honest prose, as represented by the lowly worm, has also
its exalted moments. "The last fish I caught was with a worm," says the
honest Walton, and so say I. It was the last evening of last August.
The dusk was settling deep upon a tiny meadow, scarcely ten rods from
end to end. The rank bog grass, already drenched with dew, bent over
the narrow, deep little brook so closely that it could not be fished
except with a double-shotted, baited hook, dropped delicately between
the heads of the long grasses. Underneath this canopy the trout were
feeding, taking the hook with a straight downward tug, as they made for
the hidden bank. It was already twilight when I began, and before I
reached the black belt of woods that separated the meadow from the
lake, the swift darkness of the North Country made i