I laid this fact before the landlord of the hotel of the Erzherzog Johann, as poetically as I could, but he assured me that it was of no consequence without an invitation from the gentleman to whom the streams belonged; and he had gone away for a week.  The landlord was such a good-natured person, and such an excellent sleeper, that it was impossible to believe that he could have even the smallest inaccuracy upon his conscience.  So I bade him farewell, and took my way, four miles through the woods, to the lake from which one of the streams flowed.

It was called the Grundlsee.  As I do not know the origin of the name, I cannot consistently make any moral or historical reflections upon it.  But if it has never become famous, it ought to be, for the sake of a cozy and busy little Inn, perched on a green hill beside the lake and overlooking the whole length of it, from the groups of toy villas at the foot to the heaps of real mountains at the head.  This Inn kept a thin but happy landlord, who provided me with a blue license to angle, for the inconsiderable sum of fifteen cents a day.  This conferred the right of fishing not only in the Grundlsee, but also in the smaller tarn of Toplitz, a mile above it, and in the swift stream which unites them.  It all coincided with my desire as if by magic.  A row of a couple of miles to the head of the lake, and a walk through the forest, brought me to the smaller pond; and as the afternoon sun was ploughing pale furrows through the showers, I waded out on a point of reeds and cast the artful fly in the shadow of the great cliffs of the Dead Mountains.

It was a fit scene for a lone fisherman.  But four sociable tourists promptly appeared to act as spectators and critics.  Fly-fishing usually strikes the German mind as an eccentricity which calls for remonstrance.  After one of the tourists had suggestively narrated the tale of seven trout which he had caught in another lake, with worms, on the previous Sunday, they went away for a row, (with salutations in which politeness but thinly veiled their pity,) and left me still whipping the water in vain.  Nor was the fortune of the day much better in the stream below.  It was a long and wet wade for three fish too small to keep.  I came out on the shore of the lake, where I had left the row-boat, with empty bag and a feeling of damp discouragement.

There was still an hour or so of daylight, and a beautiful place to fish where the stream poured swirling out into the lake.  A rise, and a large one, though rather slow, awakened my hopes.  Another rise, evidently made by a heavy fish, made me certain that virtue was about to be rewarded.  The third time the hook went home.  I felt the solid weight of the fish against the spring of the rod, and that curious thrill which runs up the line and down the arm, changing, somehow or other, into a pleasurable sensation of excitement as it reaches the brain.  But it was only for a moment; and then came that foolish, feeble shaking of the line from side to side which tells the angler that he has hooked a great, big, leather-mouthed chub—­a fish which Izaak Walton says “the French esteem so mean as to call him Un Vilain.”  Was it for this that I had come to the country of Francis Joseph?