expert.

Far away and long are the quaint, hawthorn-scented idyls in which Piscator, master of the angle, taught his pupil, Venator, the art of catching trout. Walton discussed artificial flies-but he caught his trout with worms. I hold to the primitive. I sing the worm, the designed and ordained worm.

Ordained and wedded to trout by that mystic and insoluble tie linking bacon and eggs, thunder and lightning, Damon and Pythias, calomel and soda, assault and battery, apple pie and cheese and the other great affinities of nature and civilization. The union is instinctive and absolute.

There is a lake in the Canadian hinterland, reached by the dimmest of new trails, forest-bound, lovely, protected from the nearest habitation-a section cabin of the Canadian National-by eight miles of the meanest undergrowth through which sweating fisherman ever followed a guide. It has been fished only within the last year or so.

It swarms with trout, high colored, high tempered fish wearing the gouty, truculent expressions of trout maturity. They regard the lures of manufacture, or they did when I was there, with a grim scorn. Izaak might cast ever so delicately and deftly and stubbornly; they remained indifferent. He might progress with mounting desperation from "Parmachene belle" and "coachman" to the amazing new inventions of the para

I sat beneath a tree and surveyed Izaak's frantic blandishments. It was a time when he yearned for no audience, yet I sat and, also, I rejoiced. It may be that, still supported by the precedent of the Great Man, I voiced a portion of my heathen glee. Izaak deserved it. His comments on bait fishing in general and one bait fisherman in particular, had been profuse and rankling enough. Now, it was pleasant to see him suffer, for his agony grew not only from his failure to interest fish in his feathered fashion-show but from knowledge that we had more fish already than we could use.

We had. I had caught trout until, literally, I was tired out. Big trout; hard fighting trout-on worms!

There may have been worms about the section foreman's cowbarn, I don't know. Between it and the lake there stretched eight miles of powdery, fir-needle loam in which no worm could live. Some naturalist may be able to explain why fish in that virgin lake could have so high an enthusiasm for so unfamiliar a food. My own solution is mystical.

For ages uncounted, longing had burned, unrequited in each speckled bosom. Barred from the God-ordained affinity, they yet had kept the faith. They had not turned to idol worship and now, at last, reunion had come. It had been my privilege to bring this about, to wed once more the trout and the worm, to add one sweet strain to the harmony of nature. These fish had never seen worms. Their far-distant ancestors knew them not, yet they welcomed them with every expres

sion of exultation short of shouts of joy.

I sing the worm and the romance of worm-fishing, the humble, unostentatious yet fashing glamour thereof. The fy-Esherman approaches a stream with a smug consciousness of rectitude. His is the air of the one correctly dressed man in a ball-room. He may brave discomforts, he may look silly but, at least, he is in fashion.

And he does look silly-far oftener than the bait-using pariah. Between catching fish, one day, I observed Izaak fishing beyond the next rapid. Overhead the branches were thick. Izaak's casts were beautiful, fluent, when he completed them; but, at least a third of the time, he was ascending or descending a tree. Had he lingered on that stream a year or so, Izaak would have become arboreal.

In fifty yards of horizontal progress, he made at least two hundred vertically. I should have liked a picture of him, reaching at a tree-top for his fly, with his clothing barkpowdered, fir-needles down his neck and lichens in his hair. It might have served as armor against the taunts forever launched at worm-fishers. But then, the fly adherents don't argue with their humbler brethren. They just tell them.

While Izaak went up and came down with the frequency of an office-building elevator, I stood beside a pool and lowered into its translucent depths, violently gesticulating worms. If the trout got the bait, he had a free dinner. If I got the trout, he had thrown away existence for at least a possible gain, not for a vanity of silk and feathers he wouldn't eat on a bet.

There is romance, melodrama, to worm-fishing, the thrill of a high heart risking all for love. There is also suspense. Into the current goes your bait-and vanishes. Only the sensitive line tells you of its progress. The drama of the unknown possesses you. The twitch that runs from fingers, up your arm and into your heart may be the signal of a twopounder, or a two-incher. You never know. Mystery and the essence of adventure are here.

Fly-fishing plumbs no depths. It is a surface, superficial matter. You can tell within reason the weight of a fish by his rise. It is a flat-toned, rather trite proceeding, no more akin to the moving profundities of wormfishing than advertising copy is like "Macbeth."

I sing the worm and its eminent fairness. Fly-fishing by comparison is no better than cheap deception. The bait-user offers what the trout wants most. It is a square gamble whereby one risks a worm against a fish. If the trout loses and you catch him, he usually has had the worm, or most of it, not a mouthful of feathers to add bitterness to death. Fly-fishing is squalid tragedy. The victim stakes his life against an utterly inedible jigger that looks like something it isn't. He can gain nothing. He may lose everything, on vanity. The sole comfort he may receive) is knowledge he has been hooked by a purist.

The worm-user keeps faith with his fish-to some extent, anyway. It's up to them to look for the joker in the lure. That is not your business. It is easy to see why a politician might. favor worms.

I sing the worm and the skill of

fishing therewith. Raucously and undauntedly I sing that my voice may be heard above the hoots of the brethren of the fly. We despised of the angle have our art, not the deftness of wrist and regard for the upper air the purist must possess, but a more appropriate and, I think, a greater cleverness-knowledge, not of the atmosphere, but of the stream itself, its current, its transparency, intuition regarding snags and boulders. We may not cast and retrieve and cast again with the glib facility of the fly-fisherman, who can try vainly four times and put his lure where he wanted it on the fifth without undue distress or delay.

He who baits his hook with a worm embarks on a graver and more elaborate enterprise. He is a merchant, sending forth an argosy. Skill is a consideration, but there are greater. He must consider the water and how it moves, the fish and what the fish probably is thinking. He must be stream-minded and trout-minded, one with nature herself, and the more nearly he harmonizes, the better his chances. The fly-fisherman must be clever. The worm addict must be wise.

The stream came over the rapids with a pleasant rush and flash of white, like a girl running downstairs. Below, it spread into a calm pool, shrank into a dark, swift channel, and dilated again, further on, into a second, where I fished. Above me, Izaak whipped the water.

I did not watch his face, for which I shall always be sorry. I was busy catching trout. Its expressions must have been worth inspection. In Izaak, passion, deep-rooted was warring against standards almost as

firmly planted. All day long, he had been faithful to the code of the fly. All day long, he had cast with a grace and beauty I affect to scorn, yet secretly envy. And all day long, I had been taking fish, while he hadn't.

I was returning them, now, to the stream as I netted them. We had more than we needed for supper and breakfast, thick-bodied, muscular fish, but Izaak's creel still was light. They simply were not rising to the fly.

Izaak's standards are admirably durable. They had been strained and lacerated for hours. Even the most consecrated can stick to his morals. just so long when, under his nose, the sinful persistently is rewarded. I brought another trout to the net, gently disengaged the hook and slipped him with a wetted hand back into the pool. Some one stood behind me-Izaak, with the set, defiant look on his face Benedict Arnold and Iscariot wore.

"Gimme a worm," he commanded in a choked voice. I complied, mutely. It was plain this was no time for cheap jesting.

He returned to his pool and dabbled about therein with my nightwalker. After a minute, a trout stole my own bait. I considered Izaak. Few things are more pitiful than the traitor unrewarded for his treachery.

"Look," I ventured, approaching him. "Probably there's nothing in this hole. Go down where I've been fishing. I know there's a trout there. Catch him and break your luck."

He obeyed without a word. I watched him fish, desperately, persistently, unavailingly. Then, I cast into the pool he had deserted and

fought a pound and a half trout to the net.

We went back to camp after that. Neither of us said anything on the way. I felt it was no time for speech.

So, I sing the worm, the appropriate, the primitive worm, God ordained and harmonizing with Nature. I do not scorn the fly-fisherman. Worm-users are notoriously charitable folk and, anyway, the fly addict spouts disparagement enough for both sides.

The complicators of the world will go on working to make it more complicated. From dry flies they will advance, a small, arrogant, scoffing group to some new height of difficulty and formalism. Let them climb. There is little, save a sense of exaltation, at the top.

Let them shout from their pinnacles. Here in the valley dwell the pleasant, friendly folk of the worldand worms. We are not lonely. Left to ourselves we should be

serenely happy. Joy, to us, does not consist in demanding that others look upward with admiration. Our amusements are too elemental and genuine to demand a claque.

The brethren of the fly may proclaim each new chapter of the gospel of complication as shrilly and insistently as they please. They will, anyway, without our permission. Let them hold that Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein advance beyond the surge and thunder of the Odyssey; that golf is better than fishing, Matisse than Rubens, soufflés than steak, psychoanalysis than prayer, Conrad than Kipling, street-lamps than stars. Let them. We have our worms.

I regret only that their racket has made the Great Man sensitive about his fishing habits. Perhaps this tenderness may be responsible for his reluctance to run again. I am sorry for that, too. I had hoped, perhaps, he might enter the lists on a Worms for Trout-Fishing ticket. There are worse political platforms.

T

HE handle of the gasoline pump twirled a rapid reverse. Uncle Asy Mulberry slid two silver dollars into his high trouserpocket and stood for a minute watching the big car rapidly diminish down the stretch of road, leading out of Hopeville toward Dawson.

"That feller says us garage men will have to look us up a new line of burglary before long," he chuckled as he again hooked the flat heels of his gum-sided Romeo shoes into the baling wire reinforcements of his chair. "Said it won't be no time till tourists will be takin' the fuel for their autos right out of the air. Now, ain't that a fool notion? Looks like folks can't wait to get dressed in the mornin', till they start puttin' forth some new theory on this, that or the other."

Uncle Asy looked up and blinked. Our chairs were tilted against the east side of the adobe garage and general repair shop, in the full blaze of an early September sun.

"We was discussin' the power of prayer," he went on, "down at prayer-meetin' last night, and the smartalecky feller that's took over the management of the creamery-I never can recollect his name-got up to make a few remarks on the subject.

"In all the seventy-eight years I've been knockin' 'round, most of 'em right here in Tumbleweed Valley, I ain't never heard as nonsensical a goin's on.

"He said we was in the same state of enlightenment as the unclothed heathen of Africa, if we still clung to a personal god. 'Why, the idea,' he says, 'of thinkin' there's one man who'll make the bread raise in cold weather, or furnish the proper-colored corset strings to go with a new dress, just because you ask him to.'

"It was all Ma could do to keep me from gettin' up and tellin' him how Job had prayed God right out of hundreds of she asses and a lot more cattle and camels; or how John the Baptist, founder of our own church, was a direct answer to prayer, even though Elisabeth, his ma, had reached the age when such happenin's are a bit uncommon. 'Course he'd of said that was old fogy stuff out of the Bible; but you bet I could of made him believe there was somethin' in prayer, if I'd of told him about Miss Pansy's pansies."

Uncle Asy turned his attention to his side coat-pocket, and after four attempts, which netted him a piece of string, a tire cap, a bolt and a nut, he succeeded in fishing out the foreshortened corn-cob.