The best trolling-rods are made by George Karr, of Grand Street, and Ben Welch, of Cherry St., New York.
The reel should be a simple one, large enough to contain one hundred yards of line.
This truly sporting mode of killing the Striped Bass is not used in New York, where, in fact, there are few fishermen, except fly fishermen—some very good, although, like angel visits—or pot fishermen.
There the crab and the shrimp, with a dobber, as the pot fishermen call it, is the weapon, and the best wielder of it is he who brings the most and heaviest fish to pot, with the most violence and the least skill.
The autumn being past, the Striped Bass retires for the winter to the mud-holes, which he loves, the soft, warm coves at the mouths of rivers and estuaries, wherein he lurks requiescent until spring again calls his prey into the rivers, and himself out of his lurking-places.
These be his times, his seasons, his baits, and his places; as to his local habitation, and the place where he deposits and brings up his children, nobody distinctly knowing, we shall be exceeding glad to receive facts whereon to constitute something approaching to that which is unwritten—the complete natural history of the Bass.
THE SMOKER.
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BY THOMAS S. DONOHO.