Fishing With a Fly

MAY, 1925

BY BLISS PERRY

I

I CONFESS that I am a fisherman of little or no reputation. Whatever good repute I might conceivably have won I forfeited, more than a score of years ago, by writing — and accepting — for the Atlantic an essay on ‘Fishing with a Worm.’ I shall never live down that essay. No matter what fish I have brought proudly home since then, — brook trout or rainbows, brown trout or gray, sea trout or salmon, — there is always some cynical friend to insinuate that I probably caught them with a worm! I shall never rehabilitate myself, not even if the present editor of the Atlantic takes pity on me and prints these meditations upon the art and mystery of fishing with a fly.

That old essay had at least the merit of honesty — a virtue not always attributed to fishermen. It admitted that fly-fishing is the finer art, wherever fly-fishing is to be had. It claimed merely that on waters where such fishing is impracticable there is much to be said for making the best of the situation and using the despised and wriggling worm. I hope that this paper will be equally honest, and I shall therefore unburden myself with a second confession, namely, that I am only a mediocre practitioner of the art which I am now attempting to praise. This is no Halford or Hewitt! The critic in me reports of the angler in me: —

‘I have watched that fellow fishing, on and off, for fifty years. He has never learned to make his own flies. He ties a clumsy knot. He uses too heavy leaders. He sticks to that old warped Leonard rod because it once belonged to Dr. James O. Murray, though he has far better ones in his rod case. He gets fair distance in casting, especially with a two-handed salmon-rod, but his wrist is not quite supple enough. I consider him poor with the dry fly. He seems really happier when fishing with a wet fly downstream, like the Early Victorians. But I have actually seen him kill good trout, fishing acrossstream, with a dry fly on the dropper and a wet one for the tail fly: a method entirely illogical. He is superstitious about his choice of flies. He pays too much attention to his “ hunches" and too little to the natural flies to which the trout happen to be rising. I call him obstinate. He plays a small fish well enough, but he gets flurried with the big ones. He nets other men’s fish much better than his own. He takes foolish chances in shooting rapids and climbing slippery rocks and wading salmon rivers in flood. I would n’t grade him A or even B. About a C+.’

Critics are always right, even when they miss the point. The point is that the fun and glory of fishing consist in fishing, and not in being ‘high rod.’ The men with whom I have had the happiest days on various rivers — L. the painter and A. the oculist, and C.E.B.C., the ‘D.D.S. ‘ — are far more delicate fly-fishermen than I shall ever be. For that matter, L. B., a village blacksmith in Cape Breton, whom I left sorrowfully shoeing a horse one Saturday afternoon last July when he had promised to fish the Forks pool with me, has a more delicate hand than any of them when it comes to fishing ‘far and fine.’ But the whole spirit of competition is alien to the true angler’s mood. What difference does it make whose basket is heaviest? Everyone likes his share of luck, of course, — his to-day and another man’s tomorrow, — but when you go fishing you are dealing with what Royce used to call the Absolute. All relativities are irrelevant.

It is for this reason that even the clumsiest angler may record his guesses at the secret of the peculiar satisfaction which fly-fishing affords. Guesses they must remain, for no one can give an adequate explanation. ‘Exactly what is the nature of this pleasure which you find in smoking?’ President Eliot once asked me with benignant skepticism.

I did not pass that examination very well. I doubt if any smoker can. But your fly-fisherman, at least, is voluble enough in his own defense. (Give him a moment first, to light his pipe!)

For one thing, — and this is a consideration which might appeal to President Eliot, a veteran champion of training of the eye and hand, — flyfishing calls for the most precise and fastidious manipulation of exquisitely fashioned tools. A threeor four-ounce split-bamboo rod, with a well-balanced reel, a tapered casting-line, a leader of the proper fineness, and a well-tied fly or flies, is one of the most perfectly designed and executed triumphs of human artisanship. A violin is but little better. At its pitch of dainty perfection it delights both the eye and the tactile sense, for not every rod which is beautifully made has the crowning virtue of the right ‘feel.’ And that it should look right and ‘feel’ right as it comes to you from the skilled workman is only a part of the visual and manual pleasure which it yields. For you, with your quite individual bodily and mental habits, your slowly acquired art as a fisherman, must now use this fragile combination of wood and steel and silk and gut and feathers under the most subtly variable conditions of light, wind, and water. You must be able to cast with either hand, in every imaginable posture, and under all mental conditions of exaltation or fatigue. Most trout that are hooked are struck within twenty-five or thirty feet of the fisherman, but on occasion you will wish to cast twice that distance or even more. And there is no moment of a long day on brook, river, or lake, whether your creel is filling or empty, when you are not conscious of the rich pleasure of using an instrument which is beautiful and exquisite in itself.

The very artificiality of the means employed heightens the enjoyment of fly-fishing. You choose deliberately the lightest tackle that will hold the fish. Perhaps you use a barbless hook, to increase the odds against you. At any rate, you give the fish a sporting chance. You neither net nor spear nor dynamite him. You challenge him to a trial of wits, his against yours. It does not become me to speak disrespectfully of the man who drops a fat worm, anchored to a steel rod, under the nose of some trout lurking in a bushy tangle of the brook, and ‘derricks’ him on to the bank. I have done it too often! And there are exciting minutes in striking a big ‘laker’ seventy feet below the surface, or in trolling with a minnow or spinner for pike or landlocked salmon. Nevertheless, if a fish has been well hooked under such conditions, with powerful tackle, it is all up with him. He has little or no chance. But when a rainbow or brook or sea trout — and above all a fresh-run salmon — takes the fly the struggle is only begun. The lighter the tackle the greater the margin of uncertainty, and of glory if you win. Every angler who has had a sea trout weighing a pound or two rise accidentally to his salmon fly when he was fishing with a fifteen-foot, twohanded rod, knows the disappointing, unsportsmanlike sensation of reeling in the unlucky fish. Yet that very same sea trout on a three-ounce rod would have given noble and uncertain battle. Mr. Cleveland used to argue with me that a black bass, pound for pound, was a better fighter than a trout. He was a sturdier debater than I, and a far more experienced bass-fisherman; but if I can have a four-pound grilse on a four-ounce rod in fast water, anybody may have the bass.

Surely nothing can be more artificial, and few things more beautiful, than a man-made fly. I shall not enter upon the interminable question of the relative advantages of the fly made in exact imitation of the natural insect, versus the fly which imitates, like the Jock Scott or the Durham Ranger, no creature that ever existed. Trout and salmon rise to both of these kinds of flies — and sometimes to neither! The best debate I ever heard on this fascinating subject took place one July night in an inn on Bakers River, between a Concord parson who fished with nothing but a wet fly tied most cunningly by himself, and a Boston architect who fished with nothing but a dry fly — that is, a precise copy of a real fly, made to float upright within the field of vision of a special trout who on that day or hour is feeding upon the real fly in question. The umpire of the debate was an itinerant piano-tuner, whom I suspected of being a wormfisherman at heart. When we finally agreed to smoke a last pipe and turn in — the only thing on which we could agree at all — I ventured to ask the parson how his wet flies had worked that day. It had been bright and hot, with low water.

‘I did n’t get anything,’ confessed the parson.

‘How about you? ‘ I asked the architect.

‘Nor I either,’ replied the dry-fly expert.

Now I had been fishing, first with a wet fly, and then with a dry fly, and my luck was exactly the same as theirs!

‘Well,’ said the piano-tuner, by way of closing the discussion, ‘can any of you fellows sing? I kind o’ like a little music before I go to bed. Do you know that hotel at Woodsville?’

I remarked that it was the one celebrated by Robert Frost in the poem entitled ‘A Hundred Collars.’

‘Very likely,’ assented the pianotuner, vaguely. ‘Well, I was sitting there one night and there was a troupe of singers that had come down from Montreal, waiting for the Boston sleeper. One of those fellows was trying to transpose something on the piano. I says, “Here, I’ll transpose that for you, and you see if you can sing it.” So I sat down to the piano and he began to sing. Say, now, my gorry! He could sing! I’ve got his card yet. He spelled his name B-i-s-p-h-a-m. And before he got through a woman came down from upstairs and said she guessed she would sing too. Say! By midnight we had two hundred people trying to crowd into that hotel to hear her! Her name was Eames.’

And so, each with his own memories of those golden vanished voices, we fishermen crept quietly upstairs to bed — and the debate was never settled.

II

But surely a clear majority of anglers are ready to admit that fly-fishing, in addition to the singular charm which arises from the nature of its artistry, affords also an unrivaled satisfaction in its opportunities for studying the habits and behavior of noble species of fish. For there is an embryo scientist, as well as an humble artist, in every outdoors man. The fly-fisherman, through long practice in alert observation, develops not only the sea gull’s or fish hawk’s vision for what is below the surface of the water, but also a kind of sixth sense for what the fish themselves are seeing and thinking. He learns that what really matters is not the color and shape of the fly as the fisherman looks down at it in his fly book or upon the surface of the stream, but the color and shape and reflection of light as these appear to the eyes of a fish looking at the fly from underneath in moving water. Many recent books on the dry fly have printed curiously interesting photographs, made underneath specially constructed glassbottomed fish-tanks, with the camera pointed upward, so that every motion of the rising trout, as the fly floats within his sharply limited angle of vision, is easily registered. It is demonstrable that familiar patterns of flies, photographed from below through several feet of running water, and thus giving the object as it appears to the fish rather than to the fisherman, present this whole subject of trout psychology in a new light.

The problem, obviously, is to offer to the trout something pleasing to him, and not at all something which happens to tickle your own human fancy in patterns and colors. It is as if a necktie which suits you may not appeal to your wife’s taste in the least! A year ago I fished a tiny lake in Northern Quebec. ‘You’ll find,’ said a friendly lumberman, ‘that they ‘ll take just one fly: a Parmachenee Belle, No. O’; and as I had nothing of that size in that pattern, he gave me a couple. I tried half a dozen other flies first, and had a few rises to a Dark Montreal, but the real fishing did not begin until I put on those big gaudy red-and-white No. 6’s. Now precisely why should those trout, very rarely fished over, demand that special stimulus to sense perception?

Take another instance. Last July A. and I were fishing a stream in Nova Scotia, where I had never failed to take plenty of small trout. We were planning, in fact, to lunch on trout, with some incidental coffee and bacon and toast. It was long after noon when we reached the chosen spot, and I was sure that a quarter of an hour’s fishing would provide the luncheon. To my dismay we could not take a single trout. A whole baffling hungry hour went by. Then A., who had been changing flies every few minutes, put on a tiny brown hackle. In ten minutes he took more trout than we could eat. Now why?

Or why, after lunch that day, did the trout change their mind again? It was three o’clock, sunny, windless, and very hot, when I reached a strip of dead-water, about three feet deep, thirty yards wide, and perhaps a hundred yards long, lined with thick alders. Near the foot of this deadwater, as I peered through the alders,

I saw, in full glaring sunlight, not a dozen feet away, a school of good-sized trout. Instinctively I dropped to my knees, in the wet sedge-grass. I had just broken the tip of a new and very light rod, in striking a three-quarter pounder, and though he was flapping in the basket the hastily spliced tip would not bear the slightest strain. The alders were so close behind me that a decent back-cast was impossible. In fact everything was wrong, except that I had not yet frightened the trout. I put on a No. 12 Silver Doctor and, prayerfully favoring the broken tip, managed to flick a nondescript backhanded underhand cast so as to reach the fish, who were still not fifteen feet upstream. Thump! The tip held, and the net was under him; and so it went — thump! thump! — for a quarter of an hour, my aching knees sinking lower and lower into the mud, and the little Silver Doctor working magically, until ten of the prize scholars in that school had been promoted to the basket; more fish and bigger fish than I have often taken in a whole day’s sport under the most favorable conditions. And it is only fair to add that A., fifty yards upstream, balanced on a little flat rock just below a cold brook that ran into the dead-water, and fishing with a tiny brown dry fly which neither of us could identify, took even more trout that afternoon than I did — most of them actually in his own shadow, as the dry fly floated back downstream toward him.

No, there is simply no understanding the mysteries of a trout’s eye and mind. Their habits seem so fixed that learned scientists can write books about them; and then all at once they go plunging off their orbit in some subaqueous brainstorm. The best fly-fishing I ever expect to have was during a September snow-squall, well up toward Hudson’s Bay. The rise lasted about half an hour, and W. and I, shivering in the bottom of the rocking canoes, in a gale of wind, took seventeen brook trout, mostly males in superb color and condition, weighing altogether just under twenty pounds. Was it hunger, or the excitement of the snowstorm agitating the shallow water, or some occult mob-psychology that defies analysis, that made them rise so feverishly?

Equally fascinating is the behavior of individual fish under more normal circumstances. Are trout more shy, or less shy, in water that is constantly fished? Anglers differ widely in answering this apparently simple question. The upper ten miles of the Lamoille, for instance, are fished certainly once a day by someone during the whole season. I have fished that delightful river for twenty-five years, though never with much luck. The trout are getting scarcer each year, — thanks to the motor-cars, — but I cannot see that the fish are more shy or less shy than they are in some inaccessible streams that are fished only once or twice a summer. But there are always individual trout who contradict every usual law of their habitat. These mavericks who will not run with the herd, who are cautious when others are bold and bold when others are cautious, who are full of whims and humors, incite the fly-fisherman to his most cunning devices. They are hard to raise, hard to hook, and hard to bring to the net. If you can capture a couple of these experienced old cynics in an afternoon, you have a right to be proud.

I met on the Margaree last summer a Scotchman from Inverness who holds that no two salmon are alike in their feelings or behavior. In his selection of flies, it is true, he has gone to the extreme of simplification. He fishes with nothing but a Black Dose in the morning hours, and a Jock Scott or Silver Doctor toward evening, and, like a true Scot, he prefers a singlepointed hook. During the season of 1923, he hooked nineteen salmon in the overfished open water of the Margaree, and brought seventeen of them to the gaff—a very high average of performance, for ordinarily, if you land one salmon to every two that you hook and three that you raise, you are doing well enough. He claimed that no two of his seventeen salmon behaved in anything like the same fashion. He had to alter his strategy and tactics for each individual case, obeying the infinite variety of conditioning circumstances in each pool, as well as the varying moods, resources, and fightingquality of each fish. But I have fished that same river with an Italian bootlegger, a notoriously lucky angler, whose sole theory seems to be, after hooking a salmon, to ‘treat him rough’; that is, to give him the full pressure of a heavy rod, and reel him in without ceremony. The Scotchman seems to me, however, a finer metaphysician than the Dago, and a happier fisherman, though he may not kill any more fish.

III

An American treatise on æsthetics, in distinguishing between higher and lower pleasures, makes much of the point that the higher æsthetic impressions are permanently pleasurable in revival. Many fly-fishermen will agree with me in thinking that some of their most unalloyed happiness is in their memory of the circumstances attending the capture — or even the loss!—of some one fish. No one ever forgot his first trout! I can see myself yet, backing off a couple of rods from the brook in the Heart of Greylock, —then in spring flood, — squeezing in two boyish fists that black and slippery miracle, and not daring to take him off the hook for fear he might escape! But that first trout, like Izaak Walton’s last one, was caught with a worm. In June of that year, however, I saw for the first time a trout taken on a fly. A schoolmate, with such a dainty rod as I had never dreamed of, was fishing a deep, willow-shadowed pool just below the junction of the Ashford and Hancock brooks in South Williamstown. It was after sunset, and he was casting deftly under the willows with a white fly, when suddenly a trout leaped for it, and after a few desperate plunges was drawn coolly up on the gravel bank. It weighed exactly a pound. The captor affected to make little of his triumph; but I noticed that he presented the trout, with his compliments, to ‘Miss Blanche.’

Forty-nine years ago, and the boy’s name and face are long since forgotten, but the June dusk and the dark rippling water and the white fly and the gleaming rush of that big trout excite me still! What moments one recalls! That dawn on the Miramichi, and the gorgeously colored two-pound trout that raced a grilse for my tiny doublepointed Jock Scott, and beat the grilse by an inch! That other two-pounder at the foot of one of the Marteau lakes, at midday in full September sunshine, curving up grandly to a Montreal on a very long cast and fighting up and down the fifty-foot pool like a salmon! The leaping rainbow in the granite basin on Bakers River! The grilse hooked by Donald as we were standing on the top of the old dam on the Clearwater, when Donald — ‘showing off’ a little, as guides sometimes will — cast eighty feet downstream into a little ambercolored pool where the grilse took the fly, and I played him from the top of the dam while Donald climbed down and gaffed him! So clear was that marvelous air and still more marvelous water that I could almost count the spots upon the grilse’s flashing sides.

And here comes one of the paradoxes of fishing. By some strange trick of the memory the fish which you take or lose seem in retrospect only a bit of high light in the general picture. The exaltation of an instant of perfect skill, the heartbreaking sense of clumsiness or stupidity when you lose a salmon, lessen their poignancy in the presence of the beauty which is always waiting upon the angler. The cardinal flowers blooming twenty years ago on a mossy log upon the shadowed shore of Big Greenough pond are lovely yet, though not a trout rose that morning from under the log. The big red fox still squats on his haunches upon the far side of Norbert’s pool, wisely criticizing my unsuccessful casting. The ravens bark hoarsely in the black spruces above the Sheerdam. That pair of great horned owls still follow me down the Olmsted brook. The buck that snorted and jumped just behind me as I was making a very careful cast on the Big Magalloway still makes my heart pump — so silent was that lonely afternoon. The moose tracks are still there on the muddy shore of the St. Maurice. The cries of strange birds in the twilight haunt the willow copses along the Margaree. The endless hot afternoons on the Miramichi, while we were waiting for falling water, are no longer tedious, for now they are crowded with pictures of friendly purple finches, and mother partridges with their broods, and ‘mourningcloak’ butterflies clustering by thousands upon the worn rocks by the river. No, you may forget the fish that you catch or lose, but you can never forget the fishing!

I have no quarrel with the persons who go into the woods to peep and botanize and name all the birds without a gun. There is fun enough in this world, if properly distributed, to give everybody something. But I am stating a truism when I claim that the man with a rod or gun sees more and feels more in the woods than if he were to go empty-handed. In moments of tense excitement in watching for fish or game one’s field of vision is wider and both sight and hearing more sensitive than in any moods of mere passive receptivity to ‘Nature’s teaching.’ Never is the dawn more miraculous than when the fog first lifts along the reaches of the river and you tie on a favorite fly with chilled, fumbling fingers, light your first pipe of the day, and wade, shivering, into the chuckling water. Never is the divine and terrifying mystery of the dark so close to you as when you are stumbling campward in the twilight along an unknown trail. The woodsman who cannot understand how a man can be panic-stricken by the dark is no woodsman. He lacks a sense of the situation: of the very narrow line that separates fire, food, and shelter from the desperate horror of ‘a man lost.’ I helped find one of these men once. He rose up gaunt in the October dusk from a bog back of Spencer Mountain, and waved his arms wildly just as I was holding the rifle on him, taking him for a moose; and I shall never forget how we filled him up with coffee, trout, and venison that night, and put him safely on the ‘ tote road ‘ in the morning.

And between dawn and dark what infinite variations of air and light and color and wind play upon the mind of the fisherman as if it were an opal! The wind caresses him one moment, and torments him in the next, tossing his fly into treetops or breaking the brittle hook against a rock. But the water is the true opal. In the upper reaches of many of our New England streams the water flowing from a peat bog or cedar swamp has the tone of a very dark sherry; in full sunlight, flecked by shadows, it becomes one of Emerson’s leopard-colored rills; as it pours over granite ledges it changes to something strangely austere and pure. No two successive hours are alike to the angler, for the brook or river is changing its form and hue in every instant, and his mind and mood and artistry are affected by every yard of the gliding, Protean stream. He is watching it, not with the sentimentalist’s preoccupation with pure beauty, but rather with the fisherman’s trained perception of the effect of wind and light, of deeper or darker-colored water, of eddy or shallow, upon the next cast of his fly. The paradox is that this very preoccupation with angling seems to make him more sensitive to the enfolding beauty of the landscape.

He must, of course, to perceive it fully, have a certain capacity for philosophical detachment, a kind of Oriental superiority to failure or success. Perhaps that is what being a ‘born fisherman’ means. A. and I, a few months ago, started out to fish a famous salmon-pool. Three or four salmon could be seen lying there, dark wavering shapes in ten or fifteen feet of water. On the gravel bank above them, precisely where we had expected to take turns casting, stood an elderly gentleman who had already been fishing for three hours on that same spot.

I hope it was not mere envy of his prior occupation of the coveted ‘stand’ which made us rate him as the worst fisherman in the world. He slapped the water petulantly with a line that reached not halfway to the sulking fish; he jerked the fly out before it had a chance to float down with the current, and nervously slapped it back again. We watched him for a whole hour, and then went around him down the river. It was an enchanting afternoon, in the loveliest of valleys. We fished our prettiest, using every device known to us, but raised nothing, and by sunset we had worked back to the pool and learned what had happened. After nearly seven hours of persistent thrashing and jerking and thrashing on that one spot, a salmon — either irritated at last beyond endurance or driven by some obscure suicidal mania —had actually risen to that duffer’s fly, and been hooked, played, and gaffed! Weight, twenty-two pounds.

I must have looked what I felt. ‘Never mind,’ said A. ‘Let him have his fish. You and I have had a richer day than he.’ Was it a born fisherman’s infinite capacity for self-deception, or was it a real insight into the nature of happiness, that made us tramp upstream again, proud as two Spanish grandees, without tangible possessions, but rich in memory and in hope? As for the elderly gentleman, he did not need any philosophy. He had his salmon.

But this sense of personal prowess in killing fish or game is certainly a curious trait in civilized elderly gentlemen. Is it, as some persons believe, a survival of savagery, a reversion to primitivism? Is the distinction between killing fish and killing game a real one? Many men make it. They can no longer shoot a gray squirrel or a rabbit or partridge or even a deer; they now prefer to watch them. But they will still catch fish and shoot ducks; ‘ducks being different,’ as C. E. B. C. says. Note that they do not really need either fish or ducks for food. In fact, any fisherman who has been caught in the woods with supplies running low and has been obliged to kill fish or go hungry will tell you that angling under such circumstances loses most of its fascination. There is too much primitivism in it, and not enough illusion. But mark how narrow is the margin of pleasurable sport! If you need the fish for food, your pure pleasure in taking them diminishes. And on the other hand, when there is no question at all of actual necessity and you have simply felt like going fishing, you become conscious at some late hour upon a lucky day that you have taken ‘your share’ of fish. After that moment your pleasure swiftly evaporates; you feel unsportsmanlike in killing any more. Is not the mentality of fishermen unaccountable?

IV

There is one aspect of this reversion to primitivism, however, which is very real, and of inestimable value to sedentary gentlemen. A fishing-trip somehow taps in them unsuspected reservoirs of physical and moral energy. They may habitually put on rubbers when they walk to the post office in damp weather; they consult throat specialists; they seriously consider being examined by a life-extension institute. And here they are suddenly swinging off the Winnipeg Pullman at midnight at a flag station, with duffle bag, rod case, and rifle, to be greeted taciturnly by guides whom they have never seen but who will know them in a week better than they know themselves. They will forget all about their rubbers and their throats and the admonitions of their wives. They will wade waist-deep in icy water and crouch for hours under dripping hemlocks. At home they expect a ‘ red-cap’ to carry their suitcase and a chauffeur to open the door of their car; but here they cheerfully tote a bushel of potatoes over a hard portage if the guide has all he can do with the canoe. They can eat anything, drink anything, smoke anything, — except the native Canadian tobacco! — and crawl at night into a dirty sleeping-bag as if it were the couch of an emperor. A lifeextension institute? Did not Izaak Walton live to be ninety, and did not Henry M.’s uncle, when the ice went out of the Miramichi below Boisetown in the spring of 1922, celebrate his hundredth birthday by casting the whole day for black salmon? Nonsense! If the rod and reel are working well, and the fly book is wisely filled and the sky a bit overcast and there is just enough ripple on the water, your life-extension institute is already functioning!

The mystery of fly-fishing, after all, is what is called by the younger generation a ‘complex.’ One of its strands — not the subtlest—is mere joy in manual dexterity. Another is the exquisite artificiality with which the means are adapted to the end. There is the pleasure of accurate observation of bewildering living creatures. There is moving water, and all the changes of the sky, shadow and sunlight and raindrops upon trees and flowers, and the old inexhaustible, indescribable beauty of the world. There are a few fish. There is at times the zest of companionship and at other times the satisfaction of solitude. There are gentle memories of some ‘excellent angler, now with God.’ And always there is that deep secret of expectation, the vital energy, ever strangely renewed, which looks for some fulfillment of its dreams beyond the next height of land, below the next turn of the stream. There are no scales for weighing such imponderable things as these, but surely next to the happiness of one’s own home and work is the happiness of sitting in the bow of a canoe, rod in hand, as the guide paddles you noiselessly around the bend of an unknown river. Life offers few moments more thrilling than that, and one may be permitted to think that Death will not offer anything very different.