His
method is a study in itself.
He comes in quietly with his hat on, appropriates the most comfortable
chair, lights his pipe, and commences to puff in silence. He lets the
youngsters brag away for a while, and then, during a momentary lull, he
removes the pipe from his mouth, and remarks, as he knocks the ashes out
against the bars:
"Well, I had a haul on Tuesday evening that it's not much good my telling
anybody about."
"Oh! why's that?" they ask.
"Because I don't expect anybody would believe me if I did," replies the
old fellow calmly, and without even a tinge of bitterness in his tone, as
he refills his pipe, and requests the landlord to bring him three of
Scotch, cold.
There is a pause after this, nobody feeling sufficiently sure of himself
to contradict the old gentleman. So he has to go on by himself without
any encouragement.
"No," he continues thoughtfully; "I shouldn't believe it myself if
anybody told it to me, but it's a fact, for all that. I had been sitting
there all the afternoon and had caught literally nothing - except a few
dozen dace and a score of jack; and I was just about giving it up as a
bad job when I suddenly felt a rather smart pull at the line. I thought
it was another little one, and I went to jerk it up. Hang me, if I could
move the rod! It took me half-an-hour - half-an-hour, sir! - to land
that fish; and every moment I thought the line was going to snap! I
reached him at last, and what do you think it was? A sturgeon! a forty
pound sturgeon! taken on a line, sir! Yes, you may well look surprised -
I'll have another three of Scotch, landlord, please."
And then he goes on to tell of the astonishment of everybody who saw it;
and what his wife said, when he got home, and of what Joe Buggles thought
about it.
I asked the landlord of an inn up the river once, if it did not injure
him, sometimes, listening to the tales that the fishermen about there
told him; and he said:
"Oh, no; not now, sir. It did used to knock me over a bit at first, but,
lor love you! me and the missus we listens to `em all day now. It's what
you're used to, you know. It's what you're used to."
I knew a young man once, he was a most conscientious fellow, and, when he
took to fly-fishing, he determined never to exaggerate his hauls by more
than twenty-five per cent.
"When I have caught forty fish," said he, "then I will tell people that I
have caught fifty, and so on. But I will not lie any more than that,
because it is sinful to lie."
But the twenty-five per cent.
