on every tiny knoll the fir balsams have gained a footing, and creep down, impenetrable, to the edge of the water.  In the open spaces the Joe-Pye weed swarms.  In two minutes After leaving the upper road you have scared a mink or a rabbit, and you have probably lost the brook.  Listen!  It is only a gurgle here, droning along, smooth and dark, under the tangle of cedar-tops and the shadow of the balsams.  Follow the sound cautiously.  There, beyond the Joe-Pye weed, and between the stump and the cedar-top, is a hand’s breadth of black water.  Fly-casting is impossible in this maze of dead and living branches.  Shorten your line to two feet, or even less, bait your hook with a worm, and drop it gingerly into that gurgling crevice of water.  Before it has sunk six inches, if there is not one of those black-backed, orange-bellied, Taylor Brook trout fighting with it, something is wrong with your worm or with you.  For the trout are always there, sheltered by the brushwood that makes this half mile of fishing “not worth while.”  Below the lower road the Taylor Brook becomes uncertain water.  For half a mile it yields only fingerlings, for no explainable reason; then there are two miles of clean fishing through the deep woods, where the branches are so high that you can cast a fly again if you like, and there are long pools, where now and then a heavy fish will rise; then comes a final half mile through the alders, where you must wade, knee to waist deep, before you come to the bridge and the river.  Glorious fishing is sometimes to be had here,—­especially if you work down the gorge at twilight, casting a white miller until it is too dark to see.  But alas, there is a well-worn path along the brook, and often enough there are the very footprints of the “fellow ahead of you,” signs as disheartening to the fisherman as ever were the footprints on the sand to Robinson Crusoe.

But “between the roads” it is “too much trouble to fish;” and there lies the salvation of the humble fisherman who disdains not to use the crawling worm, nor, for that matter, to crawl himself, if need be, in order to sneak under the boughs of some overhanging cedar that casts a perpetual shadow upon the sleepy brook.  Lying here at full length, with no elbow-room to manage the rod, you must occasionally even unjoint your tip, and fish with that, using but a dozen inches of line, and not letting so much as your eyebrows show above the bank.  Is it a becoming attitude for a middle-aged citizen of the world?  That depends upon how the fish are biting.  Holing a put looks rather ridiculous also, to the mere observer, but it requires, like brook-fishing with a tip only, a very delicate wrist, perfect tactile sense, and a fine disregard of appearances.