But it was not until I was large enough to go off to the great river that wound down the valley that I really began to fish. I had then grown old enough to get first-class lines and hooks and a bamboo pole. I went with the other boys down below the town, down where our little stream joined its puny waters with the great river that scarcely seemed to care whether it joined or not, and down to the long covered bridge, where the dust lay cool and thick on the wooden floor. Here I used to sit on the masonry just below the footpath, and throw my line into the deep water, and wait for the fish to come along. Where is the boy or the man who has not fished, and who does not in some way keep up his fishing to the very last? Yet it is not easy to understand the real joys of fishing. Its fascination must grow from the fact that the line is dropped into the deep waters where the eye cannot follow and only imagination can guess what may be pulled out; it is in the everlasting hope of the human mind about the things it cannot know. In some form I am sure I have been fishing all my life, and will have no other sort of sport. Ever and ever have I been casting my line into the great unknown sea, and generally drawing it up with the hook as bare as when I threw it down; and still this in no way keeps me from dropping it in again and again, for surely sometime something will come along and bite! We are all fishers,—fishers of fish, and fishers of each other; and I know that for my part I have never managed to get others to nibble at my hook one-half so often as I have swallowed theirs.