A terrible bit of angling!

Word around the Crab and Pickle last night was that the bluegill were jumping, so this morning at dawn I was a fixture on the old banks of the creek, casting and reeling, casting and reeling, my creel opened just-so, hanging in quiet anticipation at my side.

Though the flies and little white moths (I still do not know their name, those rice-sized silvery flits) did dance thickly above the surface of the water, not one bluegill in a thousand could apparently be roused from his watery bed to feed. Perhaps it was the barometric pressure, which was particularly low this morning. We once had a dog which would sink into a deep despondency as fall arrived. She would look at her food dish as though it contained worms which bled from between their segments, and trot backwards from a good ramekin of beer like a nun presented with a ramekin of beer.

At any rate, all this thought of firm white fish with crisp skin has put me right into an angling frame of mind, and I'll be lightly damned if I'm not frying up a bit of the cornmeal-crusted tomorrow evening. What's a fellow who can't catch his own dinner, after all?