There are some fishermen who always fish as if they were being photographed.  The Taylor Brook “between the roads” is not for them.  To fish it at all is back-breaking, trouser-tearing work; to see it thoroughly fished is to learn new lessons in the art of angling.  To watch R., for example, steadily filling his six-pound creel from that unlikely stream, is like watching Sargent paint a portrait.  R. weighs two hundred and ten.  Twenty years ago he was a famous amateur pitcher, and among his present avocations are violin playing, which is good for the wrist, taxidermy, which is good for the eye, and shooting woodcock, which before the days of the new Nature Study used to be thought good for the whole man.  R. began as a fly-fisherman, but by dint of passing his summers near brooks where fly-fishing is impossible, he has become a stout-hearted apologist for the worm.  His apparatus is most singular.  It consists of a very long, cheap rod, stout enough to smash through bushes, and with the stiffest tip obtainable.  The lower end of the butt, below the reel, fits into the socket of a huge extra butt of bamboo, which R. carries unconcernedly.  To reach a distant hole, or to fish the lower end of a ripple, R. simply locks his reel, slips on the extra butt, and there is a fourteen-foot rod ready for action.  He fishes with a line unbelievably short, and a Kendal hook far too big; and when a trout jumps for that hook, R. wastes no time in manoeuvring for position.  The unlucky fish is simply “derricked,”—­to borrow a word from Theodore, most saturnine and profane of Moosehead guides.

“Shall I play him awhile?” shouted an excited sportsman to Theodore, after hooking his first big trout.

“——­no!” growled Theodore in disgust.  “Just derrick him right into the canoe!” A heroic method, surely; though it once cost me the best square-tail I ever hooked, for Theodore had forgotten the landing-net, and the gut broke in his fingers as he tried to swing the fish aboard.  But with these lively quarter-pounders of the Taylor Brook, derricking is a safer procedure.  Indeed, I have sat dejectedly on the far end of a log, after fishing the hole under it in vain, and seen the mighty R. wade downstream close behind me, adjust that comical extra butt, and jerk a couple of half-pound trout from under the very log on which I was sitting.  His device on this occasion, as I well remember, was to pass his hook but once through the middle of a big worm, let the worm sink to the bottom, and crawl along it at his leisure.  The trout could not resist.

Once, and once only, have I come near equaling R.’s record, and the way he beat me then is the justification for a whole philosophy of worm-fishing.  We were on this very Taylor Brook, and at five in the afternoon both baskets were two thirds full.  By count I had just one more fish than he.  It was raining hard.  “You fish down through the alders,” said R. magnanimously.  “I ’ll cut across and wait for you at the sawmill.  I don’t want to get any wetter, on account of my rheumatism.”