“I have just one favor to ask,” said Uncle Ike, as he puckered up his mouth in a smile, then laughed so loud that it sounded like raking a stick along a picket fence, “and that is that you don't mix your fish up that way. When the subject is girls, stick to girls, and when it is fish, stay by the fish. I know there is a great deal of similarity in the way they bite, but when you get them well hooked the result is all the same, and they have to come into the basket, whether it is a fish or a girl. The way a girl acts reminds me a good deal of a black bass. You throw your hook, nicely baited with a fat angleworm, into the water near the bass, and you think he will make a hop, skip, and jump for it, but he looks the other way, swims around the worm, and pays no attention to it, but if he sees another bass pointing toward the worm he sticks up the top fin on his back, and turns sideways, and looks mad, and seems to say, 'I'll tend to this worm myself, and you go away,' and the bass finally goes up and snuffs at the worm, and turns up his nose, and goes away, as though it was no particular interest to him, but he turns around and keeps his eye on it, though, and after awhile you think you will pull the worm out, because the bass isn't very hungry, anyway, and just as you go to pull it up there is a disturbance in the water, and the bass that had seemed to close its eyes for a nice quiet nap, makes a six-foot jump, swallows the hook, worm, and eight inches of the line, kicks up his heels, and starts for the bottom of the river, and you think you have caught onto a yearling calf, and the reel sings and burns your fingers, and the bass jumps out of the water and tries to shake the hook out of his mouth, and you work hard, and act carefully, for fear you will lose him, and you try to figure how much he weighs, and whether you will have him fried or baked, and whether you will invite a neighbor to dinner, who is always joking you about never catching any fish, and then you get him up near you, and he is tired out, and you think you never saw such a nice bass, and that it weighs at least six pounds, and just as you are reaching out with the landing net, to take him in, he gives one kick, chews off the line, you fall over backwards, and the bass disappears with a parting flop of the tail, and a man who is fishing a little ways off asks you what you had on your hook, and you say that it was nothing but a confounded dogfish, anyway, and you wind up your reel and go home, and you are so mad and hot that the leaves on the trees curl up and turn yellow like late in the fall. Many a girl has acted just that way, and finally chewed off the line, and let the man fall with a dull thud, and after he has got over it he says to those who have watched the angling that she was not much account, anyway, but all the time he knows by the feeling of goneness inside of him that he lies like a Spaniard,” and Uncle Ike tied a handkerchief over the tomato can