its elements at sight of a half-pound
trout. It was destined, though, never to meet with this embarrassment.

My casting-line bore a family resemblance to grocery string. My leader
was a piece of gut from my brother's 'cello; my flybook, an old
wallet. As for flies, they seemed beyond my means; and it was
perplexing to know what to do, until I found a book which said that it
was better by far to tie your own flies. With joyful relief I acted on
this counsel. Plucking the feather-duster, I tied two White Millers
with shoe-thread upon cod-hooks. One of these I stained and streaked
with my heart's blood into the semblance of a Parmacheene Belle. The
canary furnished materials for a Yellow May; a dooryard English
sparrow, for a Brown Hackle. My masterpiece, the beautiful,
parti-colored fly known as Jock Scott, owed its being to my sister's
Easter bonnet.

I covered the points of the hooks with pieces of cork, and fished on
the front lawn from morning to night, leaning with difficulty against
the thrust of an imaginary torrent. And I never ceased striving to
make the three flies straighten out properly as the books directed,
and fall like thistledown upon the strategic spot where the empty
tomato can was anchored, and then jiggle appetizingly down over the
four-pounder, where he sulked in the deep hole just beyond the
hydrant.

The hunting fever was wakened by the need for the Brown Hackle already
mentioned. But as the choice of weapons and of victims culminated in
the air-gun and the sparrow, respectively, my earliest hunting was
confined even more closely than my fishing to the library and the
dense and teeming forests of the imagination.

But while somewhat handicapped here by the scarcity of ferocious game,
I was more fortunate in another enthusiasm which attacked me at almost
the same time. For however unpropitious the hunting is on any given
part of the earth's surface, there is everywhere and always an
abundance of good hidden-treasure-seeking to be had. The garden, the
attic, the tennis lawn all suffered. And my initiative was
strengthened by the discovery of an incomparable book all about a dead
man's chest, and not only digging for gold in a secret island, but
finding it, too, by jingo! and fighting off the mutineers.

These aspirations naturally led to games of Pirate, or Outlaw, which
were handicapped, however, by the scarcity of playmates, and their
curious hesitation to serve as victims. As pirates and ou