a particolored father-long-legs, a thing which only some frantic specimen of orchid ever seriously approached, a creature whose wings were two strips of the fringe of a peacock's tail, whose legs descended from blue jay through red to brown, and terminated in a pair of pink trailers two inches long. Jack had found it do, and he believed it would do for me. And so it did. I began to throw again six feet above the bush, for a salmon often shifts his ground after rising. One cast--a second--another trout rises which we receive with an anathema, [Footnote: Anathema: a curse.] and drag the fly out of his reach. The fourth throw there is a swirl like the wave which arises under the blade of an oar, a sharp sense of hard resistance, a pause, and then a rush for dear life. The wheel shrieks, the line hisses through the rings, and thirty yards down the pool the great fish springs madly six feet into the air. The hook is firm in his upper jaw; he had not shaken its hold, for the hook had gone into the bone--pretty subject of delight for a reasonable man, an editor of a magazine, and a would-be philosopher, turned fifty! The enjoyments of the unreasoning part of us cannot be defended on grounds of reason, and experience shows that men who are all logic and morals, and have nothing of the animal left in them, are poor creatures after all. Any way, I defy philosophy with a twenty-pound salmon fast hooked, and a pool right ahead four hundred yards long and half full of water-lilies. "Keep him up the strame," shrieked a Paddy, who, on the screaming of the wheel, had flung down his spade in the turf bog and rushed up to see the sport. "Keep him up the strame, your honor--bloody wars! you'll lost him else." We were at fault, Jack and I. We did not understand why down stream was particularly dangerous, and Pat was too eager and too busy swearing to explain himself. Alas, his meaning became soon but too intelligible. I had overtaken the fish on the bank and had wheeled in the line again, but he was only collecting himself for a fresh rush, and the next minute it seemed as if the bottom had been knocked out of the pool and an opening made into infinity. Round flew the wheel again; fifty yards were gone in as many seconds, the rod was bending double, and the line pointed straight down; straight as if there was a lead at the end of it and unlimited space in which to sink. "Ah, didn't I tell ye so?" said Pat; "what will we do now?" Too late Jack remembered that fourteen feet down at the bottom of that pool lay the stem of a fallen oak, below which the water had made a clear channel. The fish had turned under it, and whether he was now up the river or down, or where he was who could tell? He stopped at last. "Hold him hard," said Jack, hurling off his clothes, and while I was speculating whether it would be possible to drag him back the way that he had gone, a pink body flashed from behind me, bounded off the bank with a splendid header, and disappeared.