When a man has once absorbed into his system a love for fishing or hunting, he is under the influence of an invisible power greater than that of vaccine matter or the virus of rabies. The sporting-fever is the veritable malady of St. Vitus, holding its victim forever on the go, as game-seasons come, and so long as back and legs, eye and ear, can wrestle with Time's infirmities. It breeds ambition, boasting, and "yarns" to a proverbial extent, with a general disbelief in the possible veracity of a brother sportsman, and an irresistible; desire to talk of new and privately discovered sporting-heavens. The gold-seeker stakes his claim, the "wild-catting" oil-borer boards up his lot, the inventor patents his invention, and the author copyrights his brain-fruit; but the sportsman crazily tells all he knows. So the secret gets out, and the discoverer is robbed of his treasure and forced to seek new fields for his rod and gun. Colonel Bangem had enjoyed a year's sport among the unvisited preserves of Elk River. Mrs. Bangem and Bess, their daughter, had shared his pleasures and acquired his fondness for such of them as were within feminine reach. Any ordinary man would have been perfectly satisfied with such company and delights; but no, when the bass began to leap and the salmon to flash their tails, the pressure was too great. His friends the Doctor and the Professor were written to, and summoned to his find. They came, the secret was too good to keep, and that is the way this chronicle of their doings happens to be written. No sooner was the invitation received than the Doctor eased his conscience and delighted his patients by the regular professional subterfuge of sending such of them as had money to the sea-shore, and telling those who had not that they needed no medicine at present; the Professor turned his classes over to an assistant on pretext of a sudden bronchial attack, for which a dose of mountain-air was the prescribed remedy. And so the two were whirled away on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad across the renowned valley of Virginia and the eastern valley steps of the Alleghany summits, past the gigantic basins where boil and bubble springs curative of all human ills, down the wild boulder-tossed waters and magnificent cañons of New River, around mountain-bases, through tunnels, and out into the broad, beautiful fertility of the Kanawha Valley, until the spires of Charleston revealed the last stage of their railroad journey. When their train stopped, stalwart porters relieved them of their baggage and deafened them with self-introductions in stentorian tones: "Yere's your Hale House porter!" "I's de man fer St. Albert's!"