And the same remarks will apply in a measure to the gang or trace of several hooks, usually employed in trolling or spinning the minnow. A minnow, hooked through the lips--and it may be a dead one--with a single hook, will move more lifelike, and be really more attractive to the fish, than the whirling, wabbling one, bristling with a dozen hooks. It is cruel and heartless to employ so murderous a device. I have seen the mouths of bass and pike and lake-trout lacerated and mutilated, sometimes the lips and upper jaw torn completely off, by the triangle of the spoon or the half dozen or more hooks of the gang or trace. If their use cannot be dispensed with on the score of inutility, a single hook being far more successful, their employment should be relinquished in the name of humanity. The pike will not often rise to the artificial fly, but will take it if allowed to sink a foot or two after casting. Many years ago, in Wisconsin, I devised the "polka" black-bass fly, and on its first trial, at the very first cast, it was seized by a pike of six pounds. The polka has a body of red floss silk, with spotted wings of the guinea fowl. I have frequently taken the pike with other red-bodied flies, as the Abbey, red ibis, king of the water, and Montreal, but the polka was always the favorite. Flies with bodies of peacock harl, as coachman, Henshall, Governor Alvord, etc., are very useful, as well as some with yellow bodies, as professor, queen of the water, and Lord Baltimore. The afternoon hours, especially toward sundown and until dusk, are the most promising for fly-fishing. Large flies are also successfully used in trolling for pike, from a rather slow-moving boat. For fuller instructions for fly-fishing the reader is referred to those given for the black-bass, which will answer very well for the pike, especially where the two fishes inhabit the same waters. Fishing through the ice for pike or pickerel has quite a fascination for some persons, even for those who never fish in any other way. And there is a certain kind of enjoyment in it, though actual fishing, as we understand it, has but little to do with it. If the ice is glare and free of snow, one can vary the amusement with skating. The bracing, nipping air on a clear day, with the sun shining brightly on the winter landscape, has its charms, and fishing through the ice is a good pretext for a winter outing. A dozen or more holes are cut through the ice in a circle, its diameter extending over the feeding grounds of the pike, whether small or great in extent. A fire may be built in the centre, if far from the shore on a lake, or on the shore itself if convenient to the holes. The holes being cut and a fire made for comfort, the next thing to do is to place the "tip-ups," as they are called, and bait the hooks, when there is nothing more to be done but to fill one's pipe and wait by the fire for the anticipated event--the rising of a signal proclaiming a "bite."