TROUT ON BARBLESS HOOKS

Most women who indulge in fishing are, like children, mere fish takers, not Anglers, but the craft is honored by the association of many fine female devotees who study and practice the gentle art in its fullest meaning—a devotion to the poetic, artistic, healthful, and humane elements in piscatorial pursuits. Dame Juliana Berners, who wrote the earliest volume on gentle fishing (1500), was the first celebrated example of the artful and merciful woman fisher, and Cleopatra the first female to make notorious the coarse and ungodly method in fishing for pastime. Sweet Dame Berners believed in angling—the desire of fair treatment to the quarry, correct tackle, a love of the pursuit superior to greed for number in the catch, and a heavenly admiration of the general beauties of nature in the day as well as in the play; and brutal Cleopatra believed in mere fishing, the killing of the greatest number, regardless of means, mercy, or method.

Our modern Dame Bernerses and Cleopatras in the fishing fold are many. The wife who aids the net fisherman—the marine farmer whose calling emulates the professional duties of Jesus' disciples, Peter. Andrew, James, and John—does not count. Her part in fishing, while by no means angling, is as honest as the work of the upland farmer's helpmate, and God Himself will not condemn little children, male or female, who fish indiscriminately, "because they do not know." Fishing for the modern market is just as honorable as market fishing was in the ancient days when Jesus praised the net fishermen and made them His nearest and dearest friends, and angling—merciful ungreedy fishing with humane tackle and a clear conscience—is even more righteous than net fishing, because, while the main result of the Angler's pursuit is the same as the marketman's—fish taking—the Angler's method of capture is far less cruel, and his creel of fish is far less in number than the boatful of the marketman.

The distinction in angling and fishing is made by the modes employed in the taking, the killing, and the disposing of the fishes. Any fisherman who uses tackle appropriate to the various species, who is not greedy in his catch, who plays his game with mercy, who dispatches it with the least suffering, who disposes of it without wanton waste, and who is thankful to the Maker for the ways and means for all these conditions, is an Angler. And cannot woman be as artful and gentle in pursuits and as appreciative in feeling as man? Surely. England and Scotland and Ireland are famous for their women Anglers, and Maine, the Adirondacks, California, and Canada boast of the finest female fly-casters in the world. There are more women Anglers in these last-named territories than there are men Anglers in all other parts of the United States. A woman, Mary Orris Marbury, wrote the best volume scientifically descriptive of trout, bass, and salmon flies of modern times, and Cornelia Crosby, a daughter of the Maine wilderness, is the fly-fishing enthusiast of America.

Great minds, male and female, have gentle hearts. Izaak Walton handled a frog as if he loved him. Cowper would not unnecessarily hurt a worm. Lincoln upset his White House Cabinet to rescue a mother pig from a mire. Webster neglected the Supreme Court to replace a baby robin that had fallen from its nest. Moses, John the Divine, Washington, Thoreau. Audubon, Wilson, and even Napoleon and CÆsar the mighty mankillers were all of tender hearts, and all of these were—Anglers. Christ was only a fisher of men, but He loved and associated with the fishers of fishes. Walton, the father of fishers and fishing, angled for the habits of fishes more than for their hides. The capture of a fish was insignificantly incidental to the main notion of his hours abroad—his divine love of the waters, the fields, the meadows, the skies, the trees, and God's beautiful things that inhabit these. 'Tis the soul we seek to replenish, not the creel. So a Long Island dairyman's daughter views the theme, and she handles the mother and baby trout as if she loved them. Salvelinus fontinalis, little salmon of the streams, the Angler's dearly beloved brook trout—this is the dairymaid's special delight. She breeds these rainbow-hued beauties and broods over them, she feeds and fondles them, and they are to her what David's holy, fleecy flock were to him—his blessed charge by heavenly day and cardinal care at night. They feed from her hand, and play like kittens with her fingers. Cleopatra cleaved her fishes with a murderous hand and hook. Audrey cuddles her trout with a magnanimous mind and heart.

The trout, with all its famous beauty of color, grace, and outline, all its army of admirers, all the glory of its aqua-fairyland habitat, all its seeming gentility of breeding and character, is none the less a little villain at the killing game, like the less admired feline and canine and serpentine species, for he will devour the daintiest and gaudiest butterfly that ever poet sang of. Fledgling robins and bluebirds, orioles and wrens are meat and drink to him. Young chipmunks and squirrels that lose their balance in the storm fall into his ready maw. The bat, the bee, the beetle and ladybug are rich morsels to his gastric eye, and the golden lizard, the umber ant, the silvery eel, the crawling angleworm, the chirping cricket, creeping spider, the grasshopper, the hopping frog, and e'en the heavenly hummingbird are but mealtime mites to him. Perhaps the knowledge of this life-destroying trait in all the fishes made Cleopatra indifferent to the gentler mode of fishing, just as it had a softer influence over Audrey, for she, though loving both the fishes and their victims, was induced to angle and thus punish, but never kill, her finny favorites. She had heard of the artificial dry fly Anglers of Europe using the barbless hook that held the trout without pain or injury, and this she made herself, tying up dozens of somber-hued and lustrous patterns on the bent bit of bronze that formed the snare. The ruly trout who gently waver in the deep pool, satisfied with the food supplied by their fair mistress, and who behave themselves when they swim abroad in the general ponds and streams, are not molested, but the rebellious urchins who, disdaining the bits of liver and worm fed to them in plenty, go forth to slay the happy ladybug and butterfly, are made the game of the barbless hook.

Audrey has five or six thousand trout in the pond and the stream flowing into it. The surrounding country is wildly beautiful, the water being surrounded by great trees of elm, hickory, maple, beech, chestnut, walnut, and dogwood, under which is spread a rich green lawn, with here and there patches of wild shrubs, vines, and ground flowers. Rustic benches circle the water-edge oaks, and sleek deer, as tame as Belgian hares, browse on the rich grass and eat dainty morsels from the palms of their human friends. Cleopatra's marble perch basin was cold and deadly in its artificial atmosphere. Audrey's woodland trout preserve is warm and lifelike in its natural loveliness.