The man glanced up, but deigned no reply to such impertinence.
“Could you take us where we would be likely to get any muskallonge?”
“Likely?” asked the man. “What do you suppose I am here for?”
“I beg your pardon. I'm a stranger here. I'd like to try my hand at a muskallonge. About how do they run here as to size?”
“Well,” said the fisherman, relenting a little, “that depends upon who takes you out. If you want a little sport, I can take you to it. They are running pretty well this season, or were a week ago.”
“Is it too late?”
“Well, they are scarcer than they were, unless you know where to go. I call forty pounds light for a muskallonge; fifty to seventy is about my figure. If you ain't used to this kind of fishing, and go with me, you'd better tie yourself in the boat. They are a powerful fish. You see that little island yonder? A muskallonge dragged me in this boat four times round that island one day, and just as I thought I was tiring him out he jumped clean over the island, and I had to cut the line.”
King thought he had heard something like this before, and he engaged the man for the next day. That evening was the last of the grand illuminations for the season, and our party went out in the Crossman steam-launch to see it. Although some of the cottages were vacated, and the display was not so extensive as in August, it was still marvelously beautiful, and the night voyage around the illuminated islands was something long to be remembered.
There were endless devices of colored lamps and lanterns, figures of crosses, crowns, the Seal of Solomon, and the most strange effects produced on foliage and in the water by red and green and purple fires. It was a night of enchantment, and the hotel and its grounds on the dark background of the night were like the stately pleasure-house in “Kubla Khan.”
But the season was drawing to an end. The hotels, which could not find room for the throngs on Saturday night, say, were nearly empty on Monday, so easy are pleasure-seekers frightened away by a touch of cold, forgetting that in such a resort the most enjoyable part of the year comes with the mellow autumn days. That night at ten o'clock the band was scraping away in the deserted parlor, with not another person in attendance, without a single listener. Miss Lamont happened to peep through the window-blinds from the piazza and discover this residuum of gayety. The band itself was half asleep, but by sheer force of habit it kept on, the fiddlers drawing the perfunctory bows, and the melancholy clarionet men breathing their expressive sighs. It was a dismal sight. The next morning the band had vanished.