He lets the youngsters brag away for a while, and then, during a momentary lull, he removes the pipe from his mouth, and remarks, as he knocks the ashes out against the bars: "Well, I had a haul on Tuesday evening that it's not much good my telling anybody about." "Oh! why's that ?" they ask.
"Because I don't expect anybody would believe me if I did," replies the old fellow calmly, and without even a tinge of bitterness in his tone, as he refills his pipe, and requests the landlord to bring him three of Scotch, cold.
There is a pause after this, nobody feeling sufficiently sure of himself to contradict the old gentleman.

So he has to go on by himself without any encouragement.
"No," he continues thoughtfully; "I shouldn't believe it myself if anybody told it to me, but it's a fact, for all that.

I had been sitting there all the afternoon and had caught literally nothing--except a few dozen dace and a score of jack; and I was just about giving it up as a bad job when I suddenly felt a rather smart pull at the line.

I thought it was another little one, and I went to jerk it up.

Hang me, if I could move the rod! It took me half-an-hour--half-an-hour, sir!--to land that fish; and every moment I thought the line was going to snap! I reached him at last, and what do you think it was?
A sturgeon! a forty pound sturgeon! taken on a line, sir! Yes, you may well look surprised--I'll have another three of Scotch, landlord, please." And then he goes on to tell of the astonishment of everybody who saw it; and what his wife said, when he got home, and of what Joe Buggles thought about it.
I asked the landlord of an inn up the river once, if it did not injure him, sometimes, listening to the tales that the fishermen about there told him; and he said: "Oh, no; not now, sir.