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Show FISHERMAN'S LUCK make us feel as if some one were playing friendly tricks. on us. I remember reading, one evening in May, a passage in a good book called The Procession of the Flowers, in which Colonel Higginson describes the singular luck that a friend of his enjoyed, year after year, in finding the rare blossoms of the double rueanemone. It seems that this man needed only to take a walk in the suburbs of any town, and he would come" upon a bed of these flowers, without effort or design. I envied him his good fortune, for I had never discovered even one of them. But the next morning, as I strolled out to fish the Swiftwater, down below· Billy Lerns's spring-house I found a green bank in the shadow of the wood all bespangled with tiny, trembling, twofold stars,-<louble rueanemones, for luck! It was a favourable omen, and that day I came home with a creel full of trout. The theory that Adam lived out in the woods for some time before he was put into the garden of Eden "to dress it and to keep it" has an air of probability. How else shall we account for the arboreal instincts that cling to his posterity? 98 A WILD STRAWBERRY There is a wilding strain in our blood that all the civilization in the world will not eradicate. I never knew a real boy-or, for that matter, a girl worth knowing-who would not rather climb a tree, any day, than walk up a golden stairway. It is a touch of this instinct, I suppose, that makes it more delightful to fish in the most insignificant of free streams than in a carefully stocked and preserved pond, where the fish are brought up by hand and fed on minced liver. Such elaborate precautions to ensure good luck extract all the spice from the sport of angling. Casting the fly in such a pond, if you hooked a fish, you might expect to hear the keeper say, "Ah, that is Charles, we will play him and put him back, if you please, sir; for the master is very fond of him,"-or, "Now you have got hold of Edward; let us land him and keep him; he is three years old this month, and just ready to be eaten." It would seem like taking trout out of cold storage. Who could find any pleasure in angling for the tame carp in the fish-pool of Fontainebleau? They gather at the marble steps, those venerable, courtly 99 |