We three made merry over our meal (fishermen, sailors, and artists all seem to possess cheerful souls); we talked and we joked and "the good wine quaffed"; fishing stories went round the table, true every one of them--or at least they were not impossible. I scorn that cruel libel that declares "the angler goes out in the morning full of hope, returns at evening full of whisky, and the truth is not in him." But we did not talk of fishing alone; we talked of many charmed spots where tranquil rivers flow, of sleepy pools where the big trout lie, of mountain streams with their heathery banks, streams that gurgle and splash along their rocky beds; and I learnt that a trout rises to a fly either because he is hungry, or merely out of curiosity; if the former you may surely land him, if the latter it is a touch and go if you do. Many days the trout have had their fill, so they "rise short," being only curiously minded; then the angler changes his flies, but it is not a fresh fly that is needed, but a hungry trout. Much has been said of the joys of the gentle craft. Other joys Are but toys, we are told, but I think there is another craft more gentle, fully as fascinating and as pleasure-giving--to some even more so, bold though the saying be--and that is sketching from Nature, "good, right, healthy work," Ruskin calls it, and the sketcher need never return home without something to show for his day in the open air. I do not exactly see the gentleness of taking a barbed hook out of a fish's mouth, or of impaling a wriggling worm on a hook, and to do this, mind you, "as though you loved him, that is, harm him as little as you may possibly, that he may live the longer"! which is the dictum laid down by gentle Izaak Walton. After all, may it not be that the term "gentle craft" came from the fact of the use of gentles as baits? But whether one goes a-fishing or fares forth with sketch-book and colours, much of the joy that either gentle craft gives its votaries is, I take it, the pleasant scenery they habitually find themselves amongst. Now I come to think of it, our table talk was of scenery as much as of fishing, so as a listener it struck me that to some wise men fishing after all is in the main an excuse for a delightful and restful holiday with an object, not the mere catching of fish the sole aim of it.