[Notes and reminiscences of my life as an angler]

Front matter

ALBERT R. MANN LIBRARY

New York State Colleges

OF

Dedication

The following pages are affectionately dedicated to my dear children.

I am now sixty-one years of age, and am still attached as ardently as ever to the noble sport of angling for salmon and trout. In manhood as in yoath, it has often happened that I have heen unable to leave home at the periods which nay judgment pointed out as the most promising for sport. During these times of disappointment I have never failed to seek what comfort I could in reading boobs on angling, pisciculture and kindred subjects, and frequently I have succeeded in transporting my mind to the streams I knew and loved so well. At moments such as these, when Pepperhaugh on Coquet, or Cbupland on Glen, seemed again to smile upon me, regretful feelings would rise in my mind with regard to the past, with a craving to read the record of my wanderings for half a century by broad river and rippling streams — to recall some scenes of special interest in which with companions, many of them dead or far away, I have enjoyed the fly-fishing of May, or the more productive worm-fishing of June.

Though the thoughtlessness of youth and the manifold occupations of maturer age have prevented me from keeping a regular journal of my many and varied wanderings, yet I am not whoUy without memorandum of days given to the gentle art--days which do not appear to have been noted down for the excellence of the sport obtained but by

Contents

CHAPTEE I

An Infentine Escapade — Condign Punishment — My Grandfather — My Father— My First Play— The Mimic Theatre— The Kemble Family- Listen at Durham — The Porter Family .... page 1