hole man. R. began as a fly-fisherman, but by dint of passing
his summers near brooks where fly-fishing is impossible, he has become
a stout-hearted apologist for the worm. His apparatus is most singular.
It consists of a very long, cheap rod, stout enough to smash through
bushes, and with the stiffest tip obtainable. The lower end of the
butt, below the reel, fits into the socket of a huge extra butt of
bamboo, which R. carries unconcernedly. To reach a distant hole, or to
fish the lower end of a ripple, R. simply locks his reel, slips on the
extra butt, and there is a fourteen-foot rod ready for action. He
fishes with a line unbelievably short, and a Kendal hook far too big;
and when a trout jumps for that hook, R. wastes no time in manoeuvring
for position. The unlucky fish is simply "derricked,"--to borrow a word
from Theodore, most saturnine and profane of Moosehead guides.

"Shall I play him awhile?" shouted an excited sportsman to Theodore,
after hooking his first big trout.

"----no!" growled Theodore in disgust. "Just derrick him right into the
canoe!" A heroic method, surely; though it once cost me the best
square-tail I ever hooked, for Theodore had forgotten the landing-net,
and the gut broke in his fingers as he tried to swing the fish aboard.
But with these lively quarter-pounders of the Taylor Brook, derricking
is a safer procedure. Indeed, I have sat dejectedly on the far end of a
log, after fishing the hole under it in vain, and seen the mighty R.
wade downstream close behind me, adjust that comical extra butt, and
jerk a couple of half-pound trout from under the very log on which I
was sitting. His device on this occasion, as I well remember, was to
pass his hook but once through the middle of a big worm, let the worm
sink to the bottom, and crawl along it at his leisure. The trout could
not resist.

Once, and once only, have I come near equaling R.'s record, and the way
he beat me then is the justification for a whole philosophy of
worm-fishing. We were on this very Taylor Brook, and at five in the
afternoon both baskets were two thirds full. By count I had just one
more fish than he. It was raining hard. "You fish down through the
alders," said R. magnanimously. "I 'll cut across and wait for you at
the sawmill. I don't want to get any wetter, on account of my
rheumatism."

This was rather barefaced kindness,--for whose rheumatism was ever the
worse for another hour's fishing? But I weakly accept