At the close of this red-letter day two thoughts crossed my mind--first, whether the fact that so many of my kind friends had earnestly wished that I might on this occasion kill a fish as large as the one I had lost a year ago had really been a factor in my good luck. Who can tell? The other thought which crossed my mind last year also when the great fish parted company with me was that every fisherman must surely be “a man that fortune’s buffets and rewards has ta’en with equal thanks.” Yet, as one of the keenest fishermen and gillies I have ever known, and who has now gone to his long home, used to say, “It’s easy talking and no easy doing.” A few days later my host added still more to my indebtedness to him by giving one of my daughters, who had never killed a salmon, though a very successful angler for big trout, the chance of trying the river. On her first and second days she drew a blank, but on the third day killed three fish weighing 20 lb., 19 lb., and 15 lb., all on the same fly, a silver doctor. Who says there is nothing in luck? The day I killed my big fish was the third day in the third week of the third month of the fishing season; he was the third fish killed on that day, and I hooked him at my third cast. My daughter killed her three fish on the third day she was fishing. Well might Falstaff (_Merry Wives of Windsor_, Act V., Sc. 1) say: “This is the third time--I hope luck lies in odd numbers.” My daughter’s performance was far more satisfactory in every way than mine, for fishing with the fly is, of course, incomparably superior to fishing with the minnow--at least, nearly every angler I have met says so. I venture to think, however, that my friend, Arthur Chaytor, K.C., one of the most accomplished and skilful of salmon fishers, in his delightful book, _Letters to a Salmon-Fisher’s Sons_, is altogether too severe in his castigation of minnow-fishing. “Avoid minnow-fishing for salmon,” he says (page 89), “as a canker that will eat into some of the very best days of your fly-fishing.” But need it do so? “It is a dangerous thing for you to begin its use.”