The best month for fly-fishing is June, and the best weather a light southerly or southwesterly breeze and a slightly overcast sky. Morning or evening is the best time. The worst is the middle of an intensely hot, bright, still day. It is usually thought that a change in the weather makes trout more active. Very high or very low water is undesirable. Yet when all the conditions seem perfect, one may cast over a whole school of trout without inducing them to stir a fin; and on the other hand, when the weather is most unfavorable and when the fish are gorged with food, they will, sometimes, fairly hustle one another in their eagerness to get the flies. On one hot July noon, the air and water around my boat were alive with trout for half an hour, when they stopped rising as suddenly as they had begun, without any apparent reason in one case or the other. Within two forenoon hours, I once caught twenty-five pounds of trout at the mouth of a brook emptying into one of the Rangeley lakes. Early next morning, I was rowed to the same spot and found only one solitary trout. On another occasion, I landed a five-pound and a three-pound trout from a pool in a Canadian river, without unduly disturbing the water; but although the pool contained several other fish, including one estimated to weigh over five pounds, not another trout could be induced to look at any fly in my book. Trout are very fickle and changeable, and the ingenuity sometimes required to coax them to rise adds as much zest to the sport as the suspense and excitement of hooking and landing them. [Illustration: A MOUNTAIN LAKE.]