ting in the line to try another, and the minnow was just under me, when suddenly a white shape came up through the turbid water: and instead of letting the fish plunge on the bait, I struck in my flurry and simply whipped the hooks away. I consoled myself by believing it was a slat, and it may have been: but a fresh fish was got in the same run some ten minutes later; and anyhow it is not often one hooks a salmon, fresh or no, with the first cast of the season. That was a duffer's deserts: and what is more, I could not guarantee not to have done it with a fly. So very seldom one sees a salmon actually come at the lure, that when it happens some jerky movement is apt to destroy chances. As a matter of fact, I think that the real important difference between skilful fishing and unskilled is just the amount of experience which prevents the unexpected from taking you by surprise. Any one of the other men who were on the bank that February morning would have got that fish; but any one of them, professional or amateur, killed dozens of salmon yearly. Most of us are lucky if in stray holidays we get five or six a season; and such anglers, even if they can fish, will at times go unaccountably wrong. That same season, so far as I recollect, I was fishing the Slaney in June, which is late for that river; the water was low, and was fished constantly from both banks: but I knew there were a couple of fish in one stream, and was determined to try a plan of which Harry Smyth told me. After dinner, when the last daylight was fading, I went down with a big fly such as you would fish in March. I had the river to myself, it was all an extraordinary quietness; stars began to show, but there was still twilight; and I fished steadily down, covering the water according to Harry's instructions at a pretty sharp angle: and that meant a long line. It was very pleasant, and I fished in a sort of dream, not keenly expecting the pull for which I hoped, when suddenly away down the stream-it seemed very far in that dim light-a big salmon without splash or boil came two-thirds out of the water. I was fishing by feel mainly, and it was a kind of second thought when I said to myself, "He's rising at me." And thereupon I did what in normal conditions I should never dream of doing, and struck before I felt him. He must have been just closing his mouth on it, for there was a faint touch on the line, but no more; so I lost my chance of that fish, and would have given the eyes out of my head to get him. It was good fishing thrown away, just for want of the steadiness, which is what matters. On that same stream, however, came my last piece of duffer's luck, and in some ways my biggest. I had fished several days with the reel which was not a Silex, and was more than ever convinced that you needed to be very knacky. Still, I took it down to the Slaney. We were fly-fishing, and we had got fish, but none for a couple of days, and I had brought prawns: so down I went with a prawn to fish this wide reach, with light leads. I got more than enough of trouble, and must have disentangled an over-run line three or four times: but I was determined that the fish in this pool should see a prawn, and at the best spot in it I got a pretty long cast exactly right. Then the line checked, and a fierce tear at it told me I was in something good. At the same instant I perceived that the reel would wind neither back nor forward. Luckily the bank was good: I kept abreast, and before he really started to run, by a special mercy of providence I had freed the line: it was only looped round the handles. Then he went: I never before saw a fish try to run out of a pool up-stream, but this one did. I stopped him in the swirl of water, and then he turned and went down it like a flash. There was over a hundred yards clear distance, and he tired a little towards the end and let me turn him into where the stream ran fast, but not unmanageably fast, by our bank. The reel was behaving all right with the check on, but I had no confidence in it, and I could see the fish now plainly, and I got him up-stream of me. He was still two or three feet below the surface, in no way tired; but my gaff was a long Castle Connell hazel stick; I slipped it in quietly, reached as far towards him as I could, and struck, almost experimentally. It held and I towed him to me, absolutely by the tail; then as I pulled him out endways, the hooks of the tackle in his mouth saw fit to stick into a bramble; so there was I with the biggest salmon I had ever got, tail up on the bank and his nose just lipping the water. I put down the rod, got out a knife, and stunned him, then cut away the bramble and made my way to the top of the bank with my capture. The whole affair could not have lasted much more than five minutes, but I was as beat as if I had run a mile. Then down came my host, and owned that neither he nor his father before him had ever got so big a fish on their water. Yet it was only twenty-six pounds: and the Slaney, for so considerable a stream, breeds small fish. But reviewing that adventure, I decided that providence had been extraordinarily good to me for that once, and to fish any more with that reel would be tempting providence. I now own a Silex, and have not yet killed a fish with it. When I have killed, say, forty, I may begin to think that if things go right, it is not simply duffer's luck. 496 [April AN EPISODE IN MESPOT. BY SHELLAND BRADLEY. IT was the hottest month of the year in Larzan. And the seventeenth day of the month was assuredly the hottest day. Across the river, which had shrunk to thin streaks of trickling silver, wellnigh lost in a vast expanse of sand, there was no particle of shade. Row on row, neat set, bleached white in the blazing sun, the tents of the little encampment alone bespoke an alien touch. Orderly, spotless, precise, they stood a prim reproach to their surroundings. Set so compactly, they looked as if they had gathered up their skirts against contact with the world around. Their very precision proclaimed them of the West. All else as far as the eye could reach was unmistakably of the East. Far away on this left bank of the river stretched a practically unbroken plain, deserted, unkempt, its rough untouched surface varied only by a sanddrift hillock or a patch of dryburnt scrub. On the farther bank huddled the city, a mass of sun-dried walls and irregular flat roofs heaped together without form or shape. It wore a curious look, as if it had turned its back upon the river, as if it crouched together in terror or confusion before the solid phalanx of the tents, set out in strength against it. Only rarely above the jumble of roofs rose a tired dust-laden palm, the one effort at colour that the drab city seemed to make. Seen from across the river, the city was a woman veiled. Within lay all the picturesqueness of the East; without was the sombre yashmak drawn close against prying eyes. Behind it, far off, framing it in a strange unearthly beauty at sunrise and at sunset, rose a long low range of hills. Faint against the sky-line in the heavy haze of midday, they stood out in all the exquisite colouring of the East when the light paled. In the midst of the desolate flatness that stretched on every other hand, this little range of hills drew the eye unfailingly, their brave uprising an infinite relief. The only stir of life was on the roughly marked-out football ground on the farther side of the tent city. The cruel heat of the sun had done its worst, and the day, with that brief twilight characteristic of the East, was swiftly merging into the cooler night that alone made life bearable. The game, played with that dogged energy and disregard of temperature that the Arabs regarded half with dumfoundered awe and half with amused contempt, was ended; and the players, who a moment before had moved keen, alert, taut, suddenly relaxed, and strolled slowly, limply, and damply off the ground. The still inert figures of their comrades who had sat or lain full length lazily to watch the game bestirred themselves, and joining the others, began that long discussion of the game that would continue as long as the evening lasted. For subjects of conversation among the rank and file in Larzan camp were few. And was it not for this very reason that Bransome, one of the youngest of their officers, had with much sweat levelled out the ground and driven the unwilling daily out to play? Coming straight from good quarters in a temperate climate, the appalling heat and irritating discomforts of Larzan had at the outset wellnigh paralysed the strength of the regiment. Fever had practically decimated the officers' mess, and Bransome was one of the few who had survived untouched. He was the athlete of the regiment, one of those physically gifted beings to whom proficiency in every game seems to come unsought. Brains from the academic point of view he had none. At school and at Sandhurst it had been a case of just scraping through exam. after exam. So near a thing was it that time after time it was whispered that only his athletic triumphs had pulled him through. But at last he had come into his own. Sprung from a long line of soldiers, everything that pertained to soldiering seemed to come to him as instinctively as his skill at games. Had he been asked for the date of Magna Charta or anything to do with that important document, he would have been hopelessly at sea; but did you ask him for a plan of Blenheim or Waterloo, he would have drawn it with delight and skill. He had joined the regiment straight from Sandhurst, and to him from the outset it had been the beginning and the end of all things. So great had been the changes, so many the casualties during the early years of the war, that now, save for two seniors, both at the moment on leave, he was the only officer of the regiment who had been with it in pre-war days. Once in the midst of many horrors, but the proudest day of his life, it had fallen to his lot to command it. So, though still very much a junior, his long-standing knowledge of it, combined with his keenness and athletic prowess, gave him a very special place in the life of the regiment. "Ask Bransome; he'll know," was a common saying in mess and office. And if it was anything to do with the regiment, Bransome knew. "Ask Bransome; he'll do it." And if it was anything to be done for the regiment, Bransome did it. So it was only in the accepted order of things, when they arrived at Larzan, and sickness in many forms and kinds began to do its worst, that Bransome should tackle the men. Many of them were newly joined, and when the old hands found it difficult enough to carry on under the worst physical conditions, apart from the front line, that the regiment had hitherto met with, they soon showed signs of succumbing completely. But even as soon Bransome was upon them, and his vitality proved irresistible. Men who had struggled through their early morning duties, and were prepared to spend idle listless hours for the rest of the day, brooding on their discomforts and so preparing the way for sickness, unexpectedly found themselves busy levelling out a football ground; and to their surprise growing interested in the work and looking forward to the games in store. Now never an afternoon passed but a game was in progress, and the competition to play was keen. As often as not Bransome himself played with them, and this afternoon, as he watched the teams moving off the ground and the eager flow of talk that ensued as they joined their comrades among the spectators, he felt a justifiable glow of pride in his handiwork. And he enjoyed the game as much as any of them. To-day he had played himself out to the full, and now at the end of it he was a sight for the gods. There was not a dry stitch on him, and the sweat poured off his face in great rivulets. As he reached the circle of chairs outside the mess tent, where the mess usually congregated at sundown, mopping his head and face with a towel, a shout went up at sight of him. "Go away. You make me hot to look at you," cried Wagstaffe, who had been playing tennis, but who was still comparatively immaculate in white flannels. "Don't sit in that chair; it's the only decent one we've got," shouted Awdrey, the adjutant, hastily dragging back a canvas one and thrusting forward an old wicker one. "If you don't take care you'll bust up, and then what shall we all do," drawled Dawson, whom nothing would induce to take more exercise than need be, and who secretly resented anybody else doing what he didn't. Bransome, stretched out in the wicker chair, flapped himself with a towel, and laughed at them. "Slackers!" he said, as he took the drink a kitmatghar had hastened to bring him. "You'd be twice as fit if you came and played too, and there isn't one of you who knows what a drink can be really worth." He lifted his glass as he spoke and drank slowly, with all the enjoyment of a man who knows what a thirst can be. "I wouldn't have sold that thirst for ten dibs," he said beamingly as he put down his glass. Then for a space, as the swift failing twilight deepened into night, the little group of men talked on. It was the usual |