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Show FISHERMAN'S LUCK Days in Clover, Fresh Woods, By Meadow and Stream. It is no secret, I believe, that the author is Mr. Edward Marston, the senior member of a London publishing-house. But he still clings to his retiring pen-name of "The Amateur Angler," and represents himself, by a graceful fiction, as all unskilled in the art. An instance of similar modesty is found in Mr. Andrew Lang, who entitles the first chapter of his delightful Angling Sketches (without which no fisherman's library is complete), "Confessions of a Duffer." This an engaging liberty which no one else would dare to take. The best English fish-story pure and simple, that I know, is "Crocker's Hole," by R. D. Blackmore, the creator of Lorna Doone. Let us turn now to American books about angling. Of these the merciful dispensations of Providence have brought forth no small store since Mr. W"illiarh Andrew Chatto made the ill-natured remark which is pilloried at the head of this chapter. By the way, it seems that Mr. Chatto had never heard of "The Schuylkill Fishing Company," which was founded on that romantic stream near 162 FISHING IN BOOKS Philadelphia in 1732, nor seen the Authentic Historical Memoir of that celebrated and amusing society. I am sorry for the man who cannot find pleasure in reading the appendix of The American Angler's Book, by Thaddeus Norris; or the discursive pages of Frank Forester's Fish and Fishing; or the introduction and notes of that unexcelled edition of Walton which was made by the Reverend Doctor George W. Bethune; or Superior Fishing and Game Fish of the North, by Mr. Robert B. Roosevelt; or Henshall's BooTe of the Black Bass; or the admirable disgressions of Mr. Henry P. Wells, in his Fly-Rods and Fly-Tackle, and The American Salmon Angler. Dr. William C. Prime has never put his profound knowledge of the art of angling into a manual of technical instruction; but he has written of the delights of the sport in Owl Creek Letters, and in I Go A-Fishing, and in some of the chapters of Along New England Roads and Among New England Hills, with a persuasive skill that has created many new anglers, and made many old ones grateful. It is a fitting coincidence of 163 |