depend somewhat on the length of one's purse.

Black-bass fishing! These are words to conjure with. What pleasurable emotions they call up! To the superannuated angler the words are fraught with retrospective reflections of the keenest enjoyment, while they cause the soul of the new hand to become obsessed with pleasures yet to come—pleasures rendered brighter by the rosy tint of anticipation.

With the first blossoms of spring the thoughts of many men, both old and young, turn lightly to love—the love of angling. And as the leaves unfold, and the birds begin their wooing, and the streams become clear, the premonitory symptoms of the affection are manifested in a rummaging of drawers and lockers for fly-books and tackle boxes, and the critical examination of rods and reels, and in the testing of lines and leaders. These preliminaries are the inevitable harbingers of the advent of the angling season, when black bass are leaping gayly from the waters after their enforced hibernation in the gloom and seclusion of the deep pools.

And when the encroachment of age or rheumatism forbids wading the stream, one can still sit in a boat on a quiet lake and enjoy to the full the delight and fascination of "bass fishing." What farmer's boy in the Middle West does not look forward to a Saturday when the ground is too wet to plow or plant, when he can repair to the creek or pond with his rude tackle and realize his fond dreams of fishing for black bass! And when such a day arrives, as it is sure to do, how he hurries through the chores, and with what sanguine hope he digs for angle-worms in the garden, or nets crawfish or minnows in the brook, each one good for at least one "sockdolager" of a bass. For it sometimes happens that a bass will take a wriggling earth-worm or a "soft craw" when it will not deign to notice the choicest minnow or the most cunningly devised artificial fly.

And the country lad always knows just where an old "whopper" of a bronze-back black bass has his lair beneath the roots of a big tree, or under the ledge of a moss-grown rock. To do future battle with such an one has engrossed his thoughts by day and his dreams by night, ever since the Christmas tree for him bore such fruit as a linen line, a red and green float and a dozen fishhooks.

The triumphal march of a Roman warrior, with captives chained to his chariot wheels, entering the gates of the Eternal City with a blare of trumpets and the applause of the multitude, was an event to fill his soul with just pride—but it descends to the level of vainglory and mediocrity when compared with the swelling heart of the lad as he enters the farmhouse kitchen with two or three old "lunkers" of black bass strung on a willow withe. Many times during his homeward march had he halted to admire the scale armor and spiny crests of his captive knights!

From a color sketch by Sherman F. Denton.

Large Mouth Black Bass. (Micropterus salmoides.)

And then to an appreciative audience he relates, in a graphic manner, how this one seized a minnow, and that one a crawfish, and the other one a hellgramite—and how often each one leaped from the water, and how high it jumped—and how the "ellum" rod bent and twisted as the large one tried to regain the hole under the big rock—and how the good line cut the water in curving reaches and straight lines as another one forged toward the sunken roots of the old sycamore. And then came the climax, as, with pride and regret struggling for mastery, and "suiting the action to the word and the word to the action," he tells again the old, old story of how the biggest of all, a regular "snolligoster," shook out the hook and got away!

In the years to come, will that lad exult over the capture of a mighty tuna or giant tarpon with as much genuine joy and enthusiasm as over that string of bass? Well, hardly. And as the boy is father to the man, and as we are all but children of larger growth, the black-bass angler never outlives that love and enthusiasm of his younger days—younger only as reckoned by the lapse of years.

Although the black bass, as a game fish, has come into his own only during the last two or three decades, black-bass fishing is older than the Federal Union. The quaint old naturalist, William Bartram, the "grandfather of American ornithology," in 1764, described, minutely, "bobbing" for black bass in Florida, there, as in all the Southern States, called "trout"—a name bestowed by the English colonists owing to its gameness. While black-bass fishing is comparatively a recent sport in the Eastern States, it was practiced in Kentucky, Tennessee and southern Ohio before the end of the eighteenth century. In 1805 George Snyder, the inventor of the Kentucky reel, was president of the Bourbon County Angling Club at Paris, Kentucky. Fly-fishing was practiced as early as 1840 on the Elkhorn and Kentucky rivers by Mr. J. L. Sage and others. His click reel, made by himself, is now in my possession; and George Snyder's own reel, made in 1810, a small brass multiplying reel running on garnet jewels, is still in the possession of his grandson at Louisville.

The black bass is now an acknowledged peer among game fishes, and taking him by and large excels them all, weight for weight. The generic term black bass, as here used, includes both the large-mouth bass and the small-mouth bass. The two species are as much alike as two peas in a pod, the most striking difference between them being that one has a larger mouth and larger scales than the other. When subject to the same conditions and environment, they are equal in game qualities. The habits of the two species are similar, though the large-mouth bass is more at home in ponds and weedy waters than the small-mouth bass, which prefers running streams and clear lakes. Their natural food is crawfish, for which their wide mouths and brush-like teeth are well adapted, though they do not object to an occasional minnow or small frog.

Owing to the wide distribution of black bass, fishing for it is universal. It is no less enjoyed by the rustic youth with peeled sapling rod and crawfish bait than by the artistic angler with slender wand and fairy-like flies. While black-bass fishing was known and practiced in the Ohio Valley from the earliest years of the nineteenth century, as just stated, our angling books for three-fourths of the century contained but little, if anything, about the black bass, as they were mostly compilations from English authors. The only exception were the books of Robert B. Roosevelt, an uncle of the President, who fished for black bass in Canada about 1860. At the present day there are more articles of fishing tackle made especially for black bass than for all other game fishes combined. This is proof that it is the most popular and, all things considered, the best game fish of America.

Salmon fishing, the grandest sport in the curriculum of angling, is now an expensive luxury. There is but little free water readily accessible, for all the best pools are in the