One does not go through that final ritual without a little sentiment--a little tugging about the heart. The flies were all new and trim and properly placed when you set out. They were a gay array and you were as proud of them as of a little garden. They are in disarray now. They have an unkempt look. The shells are shredded, the feathers are caked and bitten, the hackle is frazzled and frayed out. Yet you are even more proud of them than in the beginning. Then they were only a promise, fair and beautiful to look upon; now they conjure up pictures of supreme fulfillment--days and moments so firmly set upon the past that they shall not soon fade away. That big Silver Doctor--from which the shell has twice been broken, and the feathers wrapped and rewrapped--that must have been wound with a special blessing, for when all else failed it was a certain lure. The big trout below Loon Lake rose to that fly, and accordingly this battered thing will forever be preserved. This scarlet Breck, with almost every gay feather gone and the silver wrapping replaced with tinfoil--even when it displayed a mere shred of its former glory it proved far more fatal than many a newer fly. How vividly it recalls a certain wild pool of strange, dim lucence where, for me, the trout would take no other lure. And this Montreal--it has become a magic brush that paints a picture of black rocks and dark water, and my first trout taken on a cast. For a hundred years, if I live that long, this crumpled book and these broken, worn-out flies will bring back the clear, wild water and the green shores of a Nova Scotia June, the remoter silences of the deeper forest, the bright camps by twisting pools and tumbling falls, the flash of the leaping trout, the feel of the curved rod and the music of the singing reel. I shall always recall Eddie, then, and I shall bless him for many things--and forgive him for others. I shall remember Del, too, the Stout, and Charles the Strong, and that they made my camping worth while. I was a trial to them, and they were patient--almost unreasonably so. I am even sorry now for the time that my gun went off and scared Del, though it seemed amusing at the moment. When the wind beats up and down the park, and the trees are bending and cracking with ice; when I know that once more the still places of the North are white and the waters fettered--I shall shut my eyes and see again the ripple and the toss of June, and hear once more the under voices of the falls. And some day I shall return to those far shores, for it is a place to find one's soul.