My fly hooks out of my clothes. I throw a fly very grace, fully, but when it catches under my shoulder-blades, and I try to lift myself up in that manner, my companions laugh at me and make me mad.

Dr. Hayford, who had command of the expedition, told me that we would have an hour and three quarters to fish and then we would have to go back and catch the train. Therefore we hurried a good deal, and I had to leave a decrepit trout that I had found in a dead pine tree and was almost sure of. We gathered a bouquet of wild roses and ferns and cut worms and went back to the bridge to wait for No. 3. We sat there for an hour or two on a voluptuous triangular fragment of granite, telling large three-ply falsehoods about catching fish and shooting elephants in Michigan. Then we waited two or three more long weary hours, and still the train didn't come.

After a while it occurred to me that I had been made the victim of the man who had spent the most of his life telling the public about the pleasant weather of Wyoming. He enjoyed my misery and cheered me up by saying that perhaps our train had gone, and we would have to wait for the emigrant-train. We ate what lunch we had left, told a few more lies, and suffered on.

At last the thunder of the train in the distance was borne down to us, and we rose with a sigh of relief, gathered up our bouquets and decomposed trout, and prepared to board the car. But it was a work train and didn't stop.

Then I went away by myself and tried to control my fiendish temper. I thought of the doctor's interesting family at home, and how they would mourn if I were to throw him over Dale Creek bridge, and pulverize him on the rocks below. So my better nature conquered and I went back to wait a few more weeks.

The next train that came along was a freight train, and it made better time going past us than at any other point on the road.

Toward evening the regular passenger train came along. I found out which coach the doctor was going to ride in, and I got into another one. I look my poor withered little bouquet and looked at it. All the flowers were dead and so were the bugs that were in it. It was a ghostly ruin that had cost me $9.25. An idea struck me, and I gave the bouquet to the train boy to sell. I told him what the entire array of ghastliness had cost me, and asked him to get what he could out of it.

He took the collection and sold it out to the passengers, realizing, $21.35. Passengers bought them and sent them home as flowers collected at Dale Creek bridge in the Rocky mountains. Then a kind hearted gentleman on the train, who saw how sad I looked, and how ragged my clothes were, where I had cut fish-hooks out of them, took up a collection for me.

Hereafter when a man asks me to join a fishing excursion to the mountains, I hope that I shall have the moral courage and strength of character to refuse.