FISH SAUCE.
The sight of a thick, four-pound steak, just cut from a halibut that must have weighed, (the idea of a fish wading!) some two hundred pounds, reminds us that trout-fishing is just now in full operation. What a strange, weird mystery there is about mental associations! Long, long ago, we possessed a favorite trout-rod fitted with a Hollow Butt, and so it is that whenever we see a Halibut, trouting comes to our mind.
Yesterday, frogs were croaking, and insects all in green livery, with gilt buttons, contributed to Nature's Great Boston Jubilee of music with their hum. How ridiculous it seems that insects should have a hum!—and yet the Bee has its Hum in its hive.
It is at this season that enthusiastic anglers always get water on the brain. Their dreams are of gurgling brooks. They have visions of mill-ponds, with beautiful little cascades sluicing into them over dams. They stand, in imagination, on bridges, in the eddies beneath which they discern the wagging of silvery tails and rosy fins; and a very common form of nightmare with them is to fancy that the reel of the fishing-rod won't work, just as they are going to wind up a four-pound trout.
Now, also, is the time when friend gives much advice to friend on the subject of the "gentle art." (A trout's opinion on this branch of art, by the by, would be worth having. Perhaps he might not consider it so gentle.)
One student of the angle will say to another, "Always fish up the stream. Fish lie with their heads to the current and their tails in the opposite direction: therefore, by casting up-stream, you run the less chance of being seen by them."
Another says, "Be sure you make your casts down-stream; your bob-flies like it better, as you can see by the way they dance on the ripples."
Quoth another, "Always soak your casting-lines with water before you start for the river-side;" while a fourth instructs you never to straighten your lines with water, but by passing them through a piece of India rubber doubled between the finger and thumb.
Our advice is, Never cast against the wind. In fact, you can't do it; and if you try it, you run the risk of getting strabismus—that is, the Cast in your eye. Artificial flies, like artificial flowers, never should follow nature. Manufacturers of both articles perfectly understand this; and hence the superiority of their productions to the mere realities that flutter and bloom for their brief hour, and then die. There is nothing in entomology so beautiful as a well-busked trout or salmon fly. And then it is comparatively indestructible. Take a natural May Fly and squeeze it in your hand. It is reduced to a pulp. Try the same experiment with an artificial one, and its plumage remains unruffled—which is more than you do, since the chance is that you will have to employ a surgeon to extract the hook from the ball of your thumb.
