Three velvety, busy, buzzing bees Once plunged in a thistle plant up to their knees. Alas! Though plucky and stout of heart, They bounded away with an angry start. For the thistle's the touchiest thing that grows; It's the firework plant—as every one knows. And every buzzer should pass it by On the day that is known as the Fourth of July.
FLY-FISHING FOR TROUT.
By Ripley Hitchcock.
There was once a boy who thought that he could choose his birthday present more wisely than could his father and mother. He wanted an "arrow rifle"—a useless affair which has long since gone to the place where toys which are failures go. He was disappointed however. His birthday brought him not an "arrow rifle," but a light, jointed fishing-rod. Now this boy had already done some fishing with a heavy bamboo pole, or with one cut from an alder, jerking the fish out of the water, and swinging them over his head. To be sure the heavy pole made his arms ache, but his new rod, which bent at every touch, seemed to him too slender and flimsy to be of any use whatever.
I fear he was not very grateful at first, but he was properly rebuked when his father took a day from professional cares, and opened the lad's eyes to the pleasure of fishing with light tackle. When he had learned to "cast" flies with his elastic, strong rod, without hooking somebody or something not meant to be hooked; when he had seen the beautiful vermilion-spotted trout flash clear of the water, tempted by the flies; and when he had found that he could tire out and land larger fish than he had ever caught before, simply by pitting against their cunning and strength, skill and patience instead of mere brute force,—then there was opened to that boy a new world of sport and healthy recreation. He has never regretted the "arrow rifle"; and he now proposes to tell the boys as well as the girls who read St. Nicholas how to obtain something which is within the reach of both,—the greatest possible pleasure from fishing.
If one could take a bird's-eye view of our country at any time in the summer, he would see boys and girls catching all kinds of fish in all kinds of ways; some off the coast in sailboats, tugging at bluefish or mackerel, others profiting by St. Nicholas's lessons in black-bass fishing, some "skittering" for pickerel in New England lakes, others trolling for pike in the lakes and rivers of the West. But of all the fresh-water game fish there is none more beautiful and graceful or more active than the trout.
RAINBOW TROUT.
Any New York boy who has never caught a trout should go down to Fulton Market at the opening of the trout season, when trout are gathered there from all parts of the country. He will see "rainbow" trout from the Rocky Mountains, their sides iridescent, and stained as if marked by a bloody finger. These are being introduced into Eastern waters. He will find trout in the blackest of mourning robes and others gayly dressed in silver tinsel. Sometimes the vermilion spots on the side shine like fire; again they are as dull as if the fire had gone out and left only gray ashes. For there are several varieties of trout known to naturalists and traveled fishermen, and even the brook trout, called by the formidable name of Salmo fontinalis, varies greatly in color and shape in different localities. In Arizona, I have caught trout which were fairly black. In Dublin Lake in New Hampshire, the trout look like bars of polished silver as they are drawn up through the water. I never saw a more sharply marked contrast than that between the trout of two little Maine lakes, near the head-waters of the Androscoggin River. In one, the trout were long, and as thin as race-horses, and their flesh was of a salmon-pink hue; in the other, not half a mile away, the trout were short, thick, and almost hump-backed, with darker skins and lighter flesh. The first lake had a sandy, gravelly bottom, and the water was clear as crystal; the bottom of the second was muddy, and the water dark and turbid. This explained the difference in the fish, a difference always existing in trout of brooks or lakes under the same conditions.