Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1909-08-08

Swoosh! Ah-ha!-got him! Yep, got him sure
pop! Come on in here fish. and lets look at you'll
He's a fine fat, briste- whiskered catfish bout
six n quarter inches long But that's all right
about his size: he made much fuss about being
caught if he'd been two feet long. And he's fish,
the fishcatoria people write it. isn't he? Well,
then what's the difference how long how short he
is and what are the odds if he does belong to the
humble feline breed of fish!
Fishin' from the Wharf
EISHIN' off dock, or pier or stringpiece, low
not too many folks around. Best way is to select
one of those deserted, tumbledown sort O docks
piers or whatnot at which the mud and coal
barges have stopped anchorng because the business
has switched to point farther up down the stream
of those docks stT1ngp1eceS which the small
boys with their keen unfaling eye, have lighted
their swinmin headquarters. But don't try to
do any fshin when the boys are in swimmin', be-
cause their splashing would not only puncture your
serenity but disturb the fsh-if there any fish
around here at all, that IS to say.
his writer has done heap of hshin from deserted
docks and stringpeces and such like, getting never
bite and generally grizzled tugboat skipper
similar wise individual has along, after we've
sat for hours without obtaining nibble-and quite
contented over the situation, at that,-and told us
sententiously that they hant been nary fish caught
off n that dock FIR forty year, ceptin casionally
eel These sardonic persons always were greatly sur
prised after they'd thus Informed u.s. to note that we
went right sitting there and allowing our line to
the more less wafer, aIIeT con-
tenplating closely and puzzledly for long while,
they'd go off, muttering and shaking their heads.
thus clearly indicating that they considered us harm
less mbeciles. But we never minded that. We were
fshin or imagined that We Were,-otten 1t comes to
the same thing and SO it didn't bother what the
grizzed stream-wise thought about u.s.
All sorts of pleasant soothing little sounds and in
cidents to dispel the monotony-h there IS any mo-
notony-of ishn off deserted dock stringpiece.
The eddes swirl unsteady around the messy, rottng
piles and you watch the oozy rise with the
lifting water and then wetly hug the crumbling wood
neled tugboat out in midstream, throbs away and
racks its in ards pulling away at string of mud
barges on which bareegged men in red flannel shirts
sit contemplativey smoking short clay pipes; and
you of envy those fellows the fine open air. care
free life they have of it. with nothing to do but
to sit on the edge of fine large mud barge and
smoke and dangle their feet in the water
Maybe a small boy with dog joins you on the
deserted dock stringpece. The dog after smiling
at you and your can o bait, fops down beside you,
seeing that his dog approves of YOU squats himself
beside the dog, and after awhile the boy asks you
you've ever killed any pirates and you tell him that
of course you have sues and slathers OF en- and you
describe how once when you were IN command OF
ninety eight gun frigate off the Barbary Coast why
YOU sailed into hull nest of fierce cutlass- eating
Barbary pirates, and how you grappled their main
ship and captured the boss pirate and would have
ordered his ears cut off, only that might be too
Then you feel maybe, a very feeble lackadalsical
sort of tug line, and you haul IN, and there's
an anemic, sad-eyed eel, seven or eight inches IN
length, on your hook; but you reflect, eel is
fish, and
But wait a minutes an eel fish? And if an eel
isn't fish, what's he doing biting on bait just like
fish? Why, O course eel must be fish!
Let the anglers angle. We're for ishn, first, last