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Show FISHERMAN'S LUCK When you have good luck in anything, you ought to be glad. Indeed, if you are not glad, you are not really lucky. But boasting and self-glorification I would have excluded, and most of all from the behaviour of the angler. He, more than other men, is dependent for his success upon the favour of an unseen benefactor. Let his skill and industry be never so great, he can do nothing unless la bown.e chance comes to him. I was once fishing on a fair little river, the P'tit Saguenay, with two excellent anglers and pleasant companions, H. E. G-and C. S. D--. They had done all that was humanly possible to secure good sport. The stream had been well preserved. They had boxes full of beautiful flies, and castinglines imported from England, and a rod for every fish in the river. But the weather was "dour," and the water "drumly," and every day the lumbermen sent a "drive" of ten thousand spruce logs rushing down the flooded stream. For three days we had not seen a salmon, and on the fourth, despairing, we went down to angle for sea-trout in g~ FISHERMAN'S LUCK the tide of the greater Saguenay. There, in the salt water, where men say the salmon never take the fly, H. E. G--, fishing with a small troutrod, a poor, short line, and an ancient red ibis of the common kind, rose and hooked a lordly salmon of at least five-and-thirty pounds. Was not this pure luck? Pride is surely the most unbecoming of all vices in a fisherman. For though intelligence and practice and patience and genius, and many other noble things which modesty forbids him to mention, enter into his pastime, so that it is, as lzaak Walton has firmly maintained, an art; yet, because fortune still plays a controlling hand in the game, its net results should never be spoken of with a haughty and vain spirit. Let not the angler imitate Timoleon, who boasted of his luck and lost it. It is tempting Providence to print the record of your wonderf ul catches in the sporting newspapers; or at least, if it must be done, there should stand at the head of the column some humble, thankful motto, like "Non nobis, Domine." Even Father lzaak, when he has a fish on his line, says, with a due sense of 33 |