where all men go armed courtesy and toleration flourish, because no one knows what widespread carnage may result from one over-hasty pistol-shot. So fishermen, when they exchange their experiences, are careful to raise no eyebrow, to utter no dubious cough, lest the gentleness which characterises the craft should suddenly give place to wrath and contention. As of the whole, so of the part. Mutual confidence is the foundation of our society. We proceed upon the principle of "a lie for a lie and an untruth for an untruth," all goes swimmingly, and harmony prevails.
I can never understand why anybody should have wished to improve upon this admirable state of things. Yet, at one time or another, some angler must have found it unsatisfying. He was probably a fisherman of so prodigious a talent that he found that he had achieved the impossible by stretching too far the forbearance of his friends. And so, to bolster up his position amongst them, he went away and made a trophy. Armed with some distorted effigy of a 10-lb. trout, he returned to their midst and laid it before them in silence—the proud, hurt silence of the deeply-wronged man. Instead of tearing the traitor in pieces and pulverising his cast, burning the fragments and sowing the barren seashore with the ashes, they gazed dumbly upon this proof of his veracity,
