Fishermans Luck | Page 4

of
"Good-evening" and "Good-morning," and the monotonous inquiry,
"How do you do?"--a question so meaningless that it seldom tarries for
an answer. Under the new and more natural system of etiquette, when
you passed the time of day with a man you would know his business,
and the salutations of the market-place would be full of interest.
As for my chosen pursuit of angling (which I follow with diligence
when not interrupted by less important concerns), I rejoice with every
true fisherman that it has a greeting all its own and of a most
honourable antiquity. There is no written record of its origin. But it is
quite certain that since the days after the Flood, when Deucalion
"Did first this art invent Of angling, and his people taught the same,"
two honest and good-natured anglers have never met each other by the
way without crying out, "What luck?"
Here, indeed, is an epitome of the gentle art. Here is the spirit of it
embodied in a word and paying its respects to you with its native
accent. Here you see its secret charms unconsciously disclosed. The
attraction of angling for all the ages of man, from the cradle to the
grave, lies in its uncertainty. 'Tis an affair of luck.
No amount of preparation in the matter of rods and lines and hooks and
lures and nets and creels can change its essential character. No

excellence of skill in casting the delusive fly or adjusting the tempting
bait upon the hook can make the result secure. You may reduce the
chances, but you cannot eliminate them. There are a thousand points at
which fortune may intervene. The state of the weather, the height of the
water, the appetite of the fish, the presence or absence of other
anglers--all these indeterminable elements enter into the reckoning of
your success. There is no combination of stars in the firmament by
which you can forecast the piscatorial future. When you go a-fishing,
you just take your chances; you offer yourself as a candidate for
anything that may be going; you try your luck.
There are certain days that are favourites among anglers, who regard
them as propitious for the sport. I know a man who believes that the
fish always rise better on Sunday than on any other day in the week. He
complains bitterly of this supposed fact, because his religious scruples
will not allow him to take advantage of it. He confesses that he has
sometimes thought seriously of joining the Seventh-Day Baptists.
Among the Pennsylvania Dutch, in the Alleghany Mountains, I have
found a curious tradition that Ascension Day is the luckiest in the year
for fishing. On that morning the district school is apt to he thinly
attended, and you must be on the stream very early if you do not wish
to find wet footprints on the stones ahead of you.
But in fact, all these superstitions about fortunate days are idle and
presumptuous. If there were such days in the calendar, a kind and firm
Providence would never permit the race of man to discover them. It
would rob life of one of its principal attractions, and make fishing
altogether too easy to be interesting.
Fisherman's luck is so notorious that it has passed into a proverb. But
the fault with that familiar saying is that it is too short and too narrow
to cover half the variations of the angler's possible experience. For if
his luck should be bad, there is no portion of his anatomy, from the
crown of his head to the soles of his feet, that may not be thoroughly
wet. But if it should be good, he may receive an unearned blessing of
abundance not only in his basket, but also in his head and his heart, his
memory and his fancy. He may come home from some obscure,
ill-named, lovely stream--some Dry Brook, or Southwest Branch of
Smith's Run--with a creel full of trout, and a mind full of grateful
recollections of flowers that seemed to bloom for his sake, and birds

that sang a new, sweet, friendly message to his tired soul. He may
climb down to "Tommy's Rock" below the cliffs at Newport (as I have
done many a day with my lady Greygown), and, all unnoticed by the
idle, weary promenaders in the path of fashion, haul in a basketful of
blackfish, and at the same time look out across the shining sapphire
waters and inherit a wondrous good fortune of dreams--
"Have glimpses that will make him less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus
rising from the sea, Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."
But all this, you must remember, depends upon something secret and
incalculable, something that we can neither command nor predict. It is
an