“‘I plead the general issue,’ said I.

“‘There’s no such thing known to the code,’ he replied.

“‘I deny the fact, then,’ I exclaimed.

“‘That won’t do,’ he rejoined; “’the complaint is put in under oath, and you must answer by affidavit, of the truth of your denial.’

“You see my dilemma.  I remembered the circumstance of hooking a noble trout at the place alleged, and as the affair has been settled, I’ll tell you how it was.  At the head of Tupper’s Lake, one of the most beautiful sheets of water that the sun ever shone upon, lying alone among the mountains, surrounded by old primeval forests, walled in by palisadoes of rocks, and studded with islands, the Bog River enters; this river comes down from the hills away back in the wilderness, sometimes rushing with a roar over rocks and through gorges, sometimes plunging down precipices, and sometimes moving with a deep and sluggish current across a broad sweep of table land.  For several miles back of the lake, and until a few rods of the shore, it is a calm, deep river.  It then rushes down a steep, shelving rock some twenty feet into a great rocky basin; then down again over a shelving rock in a fall of twenty feet into another rocky basin; and then again in another fall of twenty or thirty feet, over a steep, shelving rock, shooting with a swift current far out into the lake.  These falls constitute a beautiful cascade, and their roar may be heard of a calm, summer evening, for miles out on the placid water.

“At the foot of these falls, in the summer season, the trout congregate; beautiful large fellows, from one to three pounds in weight; and a fly trailed across the current, or over the eddies, just at its outer edge, is a thing at which they are tolerably sure to rise.  Well, last summer, I was out that way among the lakes that lie sleeping in beauty, and along the streams that flow through the old woods, playing the savage and vagabondizing in a promiscuous way.  The river was low, and a broad rock, smooth and bare, sloping gently to the water’s edge, under which the stream whirled as it entered the lake, and above which tall trees towered, casting over it a pleasant shade, presented a tempting place to throw the fly.  I cast over the current, and trailed along towards the edge of the rock, when a three-pounder rose from his place down in the deep water.  He didn’t come head foremost, nor glancing upward, but rose square up to the surface, and pausing a single instant, darted forward like an arrow and seized the fly.  Well, away he plunged with the hook in his jaw, bending my elastic rod like a reed, the reel hissing as the line spun away eighty or a hundred feet across the current, and far out into the lake; but he was fast, and after struggling for a time, he partially surrendered, and I reeled him in.  Slowly, and with a sullen struggling, he was drawn towards the shore, sometimes with his head out of water, and sometimes diving towards