The Trout Liar.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume XV, Issue 3421, 27 October 1894, Page 2

The Trout Liar.

The trout liar is the gem of all liars. He is the saddle-rack iiar ; a moose among the antelopes ; Hyperion to a satyr ; the long-tailed comet among the quiet twinklers All men cannot be troub liars. The trout liar must be born with a peculiar Fitness for the task, and then he rnunb be educated to it, and devote himself to trout lies as a life-work. When David said m his hast?, " All men are liars," Saul and Abina' sab and Doeg tTie Edomite had probably just returned ftorn trout fishing down along the brook m the Valley of. Elah, and were telling what they had seen and what they had done, and David, as he listened to them murdering unarmed truth, naturally supposed there was no more truth left m the hearts of men m all the wide world The trout liar exceed a all other Hare, because the man who has done any amount of troutfifjiing i«, to a certain extent a travelled man. It is his custom to sit on the verandah and tell his stories, crushing all competition, and putting his feeb on the neck of all striped bass and land-locked-salmon liars. It it happens that just as he has told his master-piece the opposition trout liar comes m with a right bower, s genuine royal flush of a trout lie, the first is hurt to the heart; he m dejected and sorrowful, and lays not another word that night. But ha draws new inspiration from defeat and the very next place he goes to he appropriates the He that paralysed hint, and, unblushingly claiming it as his own, crushes down all pitiful competition with a crowning lie that only two days before crushed him. There are several kinds of trout liars. There is the liar of weights, who never catchea more than half a dozen trout a day, but they can weigh anywhere from eight to ten pounds. Then there is the liar of numbers, who always catches so many dozens m an hour and twenty-eight minutes. And there is the liar of places who knows hidden pools, datk and still, m the secret places of the rocks, that are just boiling over with trout, and he takes you under many oaths of secrecy and by stealthy and circuitous routes, to these places, and you fish m them for eight mortal hours without a nibble. But you can never corner a trout liar. Arithmetic, facts, science, probabilities, precedent, general principles, and the eternal fitness of things may combine m overwhelming array to prove him the awfullest liar m England or America; but it doesn't disturb him. He lies on calmly, confidently, always locating the scenes of his lies so far away that he is pretty certain you will n«ver go there. But there are limits to human belief. You may believe what the candidate says on the stump; you may believe what a man tells you m a horae trade ; you may believe the army liar ; and yon may believe the snake liar ; but when a man takes his cigar from his lips, and with a simple prefix of place and date start* mon a trout story, bar and bolt and lock and double-lock the gates of your belief when he gets to the mace. Don't believe one solitary trout, though it weighs less than a pound. Under the shadow of the trout, truth dies ; and the man who fishes four days and hooks only one lone trout, co small that he loses it m his empty basket, comes home the biggest liar of them ail.