The best winter angling is to be Had in that charming interval between the hallowed old holidays and that sloppy period which, of late years, heralds the slow approach of spring in these our latitudes.

The practice of angling at this season of the year for large trout, immense black bass and preternatural mascalonge, has grown of late to proportions which seem to warrant some special mention of so delightful, if unseasonable, a sport, as well as some brief description of the tackle and paraphernalia required for its fullest enjoyment.

To the winter angler a first-class outfit is of prime importance. The poles should be of well-seasoned hickory or hard maple, from eight to ten inches in diameter, in sections about three feet in length. These need not to be divested of their rich covering of bark, curved, bronzed and lichened, but should be fitted, fresh from the sheltered pile, with careful skill into an old-fashioned open fire-place, about which, in years agone, the angling forefathers of the angler of to-day told marvellous tales of deeds of "derring do" with "dipscys," bobs and poles; and about which now his children list with wonder, not unmingled with some tinge of incredulity, to His yet more wondrous recitals of brave contests and curious captures with dainty rods and delicate reels.

The winter anglers wading shoes may be made of any soft material that will protect his feet should they chance to slip from the old brass fender down upon the sombre painted brick hearth below, during some delicious drowse. Most anglers have lady friends—fair cousins and others, who make them nicely with substantially embroidered lily-pads and firm strong rosebuds and vigorous elastic daffadowndillys. These are a good protection—but the soles?

Two dollars and a half, without hob nails, and no deduction for small feet! Even winter angling has its drawbacks.

The winter angler's fishing coat should be warmly quilted to protect him from the cold, and may be of a color to suit his complexion if he has one. It should be given him by his wife or "ladye faire" as a sample of her skill in manipulating the needle and—the dressmaker.

As to the kind of lure required, much must depend upon the taste of the individual angler, but it certainly ought to be hot and not have too much water in it.

For protection against black flies, midgets and mosquitoes, he may, if he likes, smear his face and hands with oils either of tar or of pennyroyal, or he may build a "smudge" on the library table, but the most successful winter anglers I know use for this purpose a hollow tube of convenient length with a bowl at one end and a set of teeth, either real or artificial, at the other. The bowl may be filled with any harmless weed capable of burning slowly as, for example, tobacco. As a rule, one of these will answer the purpose, but if the flies are especially troublesome, or the angler should chance to be bald-headed, he may be forced to ask a brother angler to come to his assistance with a contrivance of a similar nature. Together they will probably be able to defy all attacks of the black flies or even the blues.

As to creels (or baskets) the merest mention will suffice. At the nearest newspaper office will be found one of suitable size and fair proportions. It is called a "waste basket" and is specially constructed to hold the abnormal catches made by winter anglers.

Possibly the highest charm of winter angling (or as some call it "Fireside fishing") is the grand wide ranging freedom of it. Three vast realms are at one's command. The realm of Memory, with its myriad streams of recollection filled with the fish and fancies of the Past. The realm of Anticipation bright with golden dreams of the coming open season, and lastly the realm of Pure Lying, wherein from the deep, dark pools of his own inner turpitude the angler at each cast hooks a speckled-sided Hallucination (Salmo Hullucionidus), a large-moutlied Prevarication (Micropterus Prevaricatrix), or a silver-gleaming Falsehood (Salmoides Falsus), each more huge than the other, and all "beating the record" quite out of the field. *

What wonderful vistas, what remotely narrowing perspectives, stretch away into the vague distances of the first two of these grand realms! How far reachingly the life-lines of anglers uncoil in both directions from the reel of time—"playing" the hoarded treasures of memory at one end, and making tournament easts into the future with the other! Are not the time-worn rod-case and the well-thumbed fly-book and note-book on his table, side by side with the last daintily tapered product of his plane, rasp and scraper—his rod, just finished for the coming summer—which, perchance for him may never come?

Is he not at once revelling in the past and dreaming of the future?

There is no sport, when known in all its branches, that is so fully an all-the-year-round delight as is angling.

Many an idle hour of the long winter evenings may be pleasantly passed by the angler in "going over" his tackle, oiling his reels, airing his lines, and re-arranging his flies, freeing them from the moth and rust that do corrupt. He is but a slovenly worshipper at the shrine of the good Saint Izaak, who casts aside his panoply after the last bout of autumn and gives no thought to it again till spring makes her annual jail-delivery of imprisoned life. Constant care of the belongings of his art, be he fly or bait fisher, is characteristic of the faithful angler, and only simple justice to the tackle maker. There is nothing sadder or more dejected-looking than a crippled rod and a neglected "kit" full of snarled lines, rusty hooks, and moth-eaten flies.

In the matter of winter angling, the fly-fisherman has a decided advantage over him who uses bait alone. The art for him has more side issues. He may, if he can, learn to tie flies or contrive and construct newfangled fly-books. The effort to learn will probably ruin his temper and break up his domestic relations if he has any, but it is not for me to say that "le jeu ne vaut pas la chandelle." If no domestic ties trend him toward caution as yet, and he dreads none in the future, he may even venture the attempt to make his own rods.

Let me say a word here of amateur tackle-making from the standpoint of personal experience. It is agreeable—it is even fascinating, but it does not pay; very few have the mechanical deftness, the patience, taste, and judgment combined to really excel in any of its branches. No young man with a career to make for himself by dint of constant toil or close application to a business or profession has any right to devote to these arts the time and attention they demand if even a fair degree of skill is to be attained. For the angler of "elegant leisure" this has no weight perhaps, but he too will, as a rule, find better tackle than he can make, readily at his command at a cost so inconsiderable as to quite justify me in saying that his amateur work will not pay—for, if he be young, out-of-door sports will far better serve to lay up in his still developing frame the treasures of health and vitality for future use. There are those, indeed, for whom it is a proper employment of time and who are endowed with the peculiar faculties required. To such it is a charming occupation, a delightful distraction, and a choice factor in the enjoyment of the winter angler by the fireside.

Every angler ought to keep a record or diary of his angling bouts. Most anglers do so, I think. Therein should be recorded not only the weight and size of daily catch, the number saved, and the number thrown back, (I look back with especial pride upon my record in this direction), but also some jottings of scenes, impressions, and incidents. Reading therefrom years after at the fireside he will detect a faint perfume of old forests in the winter air, and hear again in fancy the swirl of swift waters sweeping among mossy rocks.

I take up my own, quoting from it almost at random note, if you please, how, in untamed words, have expressed themselves the exhilaration of the stream—the tingling of healthy blood through ample veins—the joy in nature's aspects, and the delightful sense of unrestraint that comes only of fresh air, of wholesome exercise, of angling.

"May 20th.— * * * The streams hereabout lack two important elements which are the charm of my favorite——-kill, to wit, picturesqueness and the possibility of large trout—large, I mean, for our mountain brooks where still found au naturel. I went over the other day to Bright's Run. I don't know exactly where it is, and I consider it (next to Bright's disease of the kidneys) the very worst thing Bright has developed. It is a stream such as might properly empty into the Dismal Swamp, and find itself quite at home there. It is totally devoid, of romantic beauty—and nearly so of trout. I never worked so hard in my life for twenty-two little ones, that put me to the blush as I put them in the basket. I was perpetually in a row with the overhanging thickets and the underlying logs, and my thoughts were a monologue of exclamation points. I would not angle in Bright's turgid waters again for all the trout the most minute analysis might discover in them.

"Yesterday I had a much more agreeable day without a seven-mile ride on a pesky buck-board. I went quite alone, up the Buckhill as far as the Fall. This is a pleasant stream full of nature—and sawdust—with here and there a speckled trout and here and there a black snake. (By special permission of mr. Tennyson.) There really are now and then cool little nooks which make one envy the trout; and an occasional spring dripping with a fresh rat-tat-tat over rocks and moss and into one's whiskey in spite of all one can do. This sort of thing is what makes a trout-stream after all. You may catch a whale in a goose-pond but it isn't angling. To me much depends upon surroundings. I like to form a picturesque part of a picturesque whole. Even when there is no audience in the gallery.

"Given, a dark glen fringed with pines that sigh and pine high up aloft—a pool whose sweep is deep, around which rocks in tiers, mossy as tombstones centuries old, bow their heads in mourning—heads crowned with weeds, and grave-mounds of mother earth, and pallid flowers, pale plants and sapless vines that struggle through shadows of a day in coma, laid in the hearse of night, without a proper permit, and I am happy. I don't know just why, but if I meet an undertaker I mean to ask him. All these deep, dark hiding spots of nature seem but so many foils to the keen sense of life and thrills of vitality that fill me. My nervous system sparkles against such sombre backgrounds.

"Then, too, the Fall was lovely. Next to Niagara, the Kauterskill and Adams', this Buckhill Fall is one of the most successful, in a small way, that I know of. It might be bigger and higher and have twenty-five cents worth more water coming over it out of a dam; but for a mere casual Fall gotten up inadvertently by nature, it is very good, in an amateurish sort of away, you know!

"There is, I believe (hang it, there always is!) a romantic legend connected with—but stay!—you already guess it. Big Buck Indian—years ago—in love with mother-in-law—commits suicide—jumps over the ledge—ever since on moonlight nights, water the color of blood (probably tannery just above the Fall), Buck Kill, now corrupted into Buckhill. In the march of civilization the last impedimenta to be left by the wayside are the beautiful superstitions of ignorance.

"I am now quite alone here. A young music composer, hitherto my companion, left yesterday, so I am handcuffed to nature in solitary confinement.

"By the way, my composer was a voluntary exile from the domestic arena. He had but recently married—to formulate it by proportions—say about a ton of mother-in-law to about an ounce of wife, and when the contest waxed fiercer than became the endurance of a sensitive nature, he packed his bag and came a-fishing. He was a capital angler—a phenomenal musician and had an appetite and digestion like one or more of the valiant trencher men of England's merrie days, so he solaced his grief with Sonatas and buckwheat cakes in the mornings and tears and ginger-bread in the evenings. He was a born genius and as beautiful as a dream, so I advised him to go home, choke his m-in-l, kiss his wife and live happily all the days of his life. I think he has gone to try the plan.

"Speaking of buckwheat cakes, you can go out here most any time and catch a nice mess running about a half a pound and game all the way through. No! No!

"I'm thinking of the trout! I mean they are light as a feather, and taste to me just as did those I never had half enough of when I was a lad with my good old Presbyterian grandmother, who would not 'set' the batter on Saturday night lest it should 'work' on the Sabbath.

"Just here I wish to record an event which has happened to me while yet each detail is fresh in my memory.

"The day had been showery, yet the fishing had been very poor, so I went at sunset to try my luck in the stream near the house, where are some fair pools and a semi-occasional trout.

"The darkness had begun to gather, indeed it was so dark that I knew only by the instinct of habit where my flies fell upon the water, for I could not fairly see them. I had just made a cast across a little rock which protruded somewhat above the surface into a small pool behind, and was slowly drawing my line toward me, when I perceived a frog seated upon the rock, watching the proceedings with some apparent anxiety. Hardly had I made out his frogship in the gloaming, when pop! he went into the water. 'Kerchung!' At this instant I felt a strike and returned the compliment sharply, so as to set my hook well in and make sure of my trout. He was very game, and I was obliged to play him with a five and a half ounce rod for some time, but finally landed him in good form, only to discover that instead of a trout I had taken froggy on a black hackle fly, setting the hook firmly into the thin membrane which connects the two hind legs and just where the tail ought to be. This left him the fullest freedom of action and gave him so good a chance to fight me that I never suspected him of being anything less than a half-pounder. He must have jumped from the rock directly on to the fly trailing behind it and been thus hooked by my 'strike.' Mem. —This story is true as gospel, but better not tell it where you enjoy an exceptional reputation for veracity.

"July 19th. * * * Nothing has happened! Nothing ever does happen here. Delightful existence, free from events! I remember hearing Homer Martin once say that it was the height of his artistic ambition to paint a picture without objects. The confounded objects, he said, always would get wrong and destroy his best effects. How far this was intended to be a humorous paradox and how far the suggestion of an artistic ideal, I know not, but I surely somewhere have seen a painting—from whose brush I cannot say—which quite nearly fulfilled this strange condition. It represented an horizon, where met a cloudless, moonless, starless summer sky and a waveless, almost motionless sea—these and an atmosphere. The effect was that one could hardly perceive where the sea ceased and the sky began. I wonder if it would not be thus with a life quite devoid of events—would one be able to distinguish such from Heaven?

"The charm of it is that it leaves both the physical and intellectual in one to develop freely. When a cow, grazing in a woodland pasture, comes at noonday to the brook to drink and then calmly and not without a certain ungainly majesty of movement, crosses the deep pool and climbs the steep hank on the other side, by no apparent motive urged save of her own sweet will, she always looks refreshed and filled in some sort with the stolid bovine expression of great contentment. Mark how different it all is when the same cow crosses the same brook driven by the barefooted urchin with a gad and shrill cries and a possible small dog in the background. How wearily and breathlessly she wades, and with what distressful pan tings she climbs, and how unhappy and enduring and long-suffering she appears, as you watch her shuffle away down the cow-path homeward! It's the Must that hurts. It's the barefooted urchin Necessity with his infernal gad Ambition and his ugly little cur dog Want, always chasing and shouting after one, that makes it so tiresome to cross the stream.

"Then, too, as to the mind. Shall not one gain better intellectual growth when beyond the reach of the imperial ukase of daily custom which fixes the mind upon and chains the tongue to some leading event of the passing hour?

"In swift and endless succession come foul murders, robberies, revolutions, sickening disasters, nameless crimes, and all the long list of events, and are as so many manacles upon the mind.

"I hate Events. They bore me. All except taking a pound trout.

"Alas! what a rent these last words make in the balloon I have been inflating! Logic (another troublesome nuisance, evolved, probably, at Hunter's Point) forces me from the clouds to earth and insists that I shall accept a trite aphorism: 'Little events fill little minds; great events for big ones.'

"Then if I take refuge in the cowardly device of saying I don't want a big mind, what becomes of my theory of intellectual development as the outgrowth of an eventless life!

"I decline to follow out more in detail this or any other line of argument. One can't argue in the face of such an event as the thermometer in the nineties away up here in the mountains.

"This chance allusion to logic reminds me that I have recently heard from a dear old angling friend. He writes incidentally that since his return to his active professional duties he has made money enough to pay many times over the expenses of his recent two weeks' fishing bout with me. I have written him that he might find it well to start at once upon another trip. I have no doubt there exists a certain correlation of forces whereby a week's fishing, with its resultant increase of oxygenation, and rebuilding of gray tissue, accurately represents a certain amount of possible mental labor and thus, indirectly, a fixed sum of money.

"It is then alarming to think how abnormally rich a man might become if he fished all the time."

If I have thus quoted somewhat at length vaporings of other days from my note book it has been only to suggest to others, whose angling experiences are and have been wider and more varied than my own, how readily they can organize a "preserve" for winter angling. Believe me, no event, no feeling, no passing observation of your surroundings can be too trivial to record, and each written line will, in years to come, suggest a page of pleasant memories when as "Nessmuk" says—

"The Winter streams are frozen

And the Nor'west winds are out."

"Mr. Webster's sport of angling has given him many opportunities for composition, his famous address on Bunker Hill having been mostly planned out on Marshpee Brook; and it is said that the following exclamation was first heard by a couple of huge trout immediately on their being transferred to his fishing-basket, as it subsequently was heard at Bunker Hill by many thousands of his fellow-citizens: 'Venerable men! you have come down to us from a former generation. Heaven has bounteously lengthened out your lives that you might behold this joyous day.'"—Lan-man's Life of Webster.

"How, I love fishing dearly. There is no sport like it for me, but there is a vast deal in fishing besides catching fish."—H. H. Thompson.

13. The Triumph.

14. Alexandra.

15. Seth Green.

16. Jungle Cock.

17. Fitz-Maurice.

18. Caddis.

19. Davis.

"When fish are basking during the mid-day hours in the hot summer months, they are not always to be drawn to the surface. But the combination more suitable for this method is the dressing known as the 'Alexandra Fly.'"—David Foster.

"The exertion of crossing the Atlantic for fly-fishing will be amply repaid the sportsman by the quantity and weight of the fish he will capture; for there the fish are not troubled with the fastidiousness of appetite which in Great Britain causes it always to be a source of doubt whether the water is in proper order, the wind in the east, or thunder overhead, either of which, or all combined, too frequently cause the most industrious to return, after a long and laborious day, with an empty basket."—Parser Gilmore.

"Of all places, commend me, in the still of the evening, to the long placid pool, shallow on one side, with deeper water and an abrupt overhanging bank opposite. Where the sun has shone all day, and legions of ephemera sported in its declining rays; the bloom of the rye or clover scenting the air from the adjoining field! Now light a fresh pipe, and put on a pale Ginger Hackle for your tail-fly, and a little white-winged Coachman for your dropper. Then wade in cautiously—move like a shadow—don't make a ripple. Cast, slowly, long, light; let your stretcher sink a little. There, he has taken the Ginger—lead him around gently to the shallow side as you reel him in, but don't move from your position—let him tug awhile, put your net under him, break his neck, and slip him into your creel. Draw your line through the rings—cast again; another and another—keep on until you can see only the ripple made by your fly; or know when it falls, by the slight tremor it imparts through the whole line down to your hand—until the whip-poor-will begins his evening song, and the little water-frog tweets in the grass close by not till then is it time to go home."—Thaddeus Norris.

"You may always know a large trout when feeding in the evening. He rises continuously, or at small intervals—in a still water almost always in the same place, and makes little noise—barely elevating his mouth to suck in the fly, and sometimes showing his back-fin and tail. A large circle spreads around him, but there are seldom any bubbles when he breaks the water, which usually indicates the coarser fish."—Sir Humphry Davy.

"It is not difficult to learn how to cast; but it is difficult to learn not to snap the fins off at every throw."—Charles Dudley Warner.