FISHERMAN'S LUCK AND SOME OTHER UNCERTAIN THINGS by Henry van Dyke

FISHERMAN'S LUCK AND SOME OTHER UNCERTAIN THINGS
by Henry van Dyke
"Now I conclude that not only in Physicke, but likewise in sundry
more certaine arts, fortune hath great share in them."
M. DE MONTAIGNE: Divers Events.
DEDICATION TO MY LADY GRAYGOWN
Here is the basket; I bring it home to you. There are no great fish
in it. But perhaps there may be one or two little ones which will
be to your taste. And there are a few shining pebbles from the bed
of the brook, and ferns from the cool, green woods, and wild flowers
from the places that you remember. I would fain console you, if I
could, for the hardship of having married an angler: a man who
relapses into his mania with the return of every spring, and never
sees a little river without wishing to fish in it. But after all,
we have had good times together as we have followed the stream of
life towards the sea. And we have passed through the dark days
without losing heart, because we were comrades. So let this book
tell you one thing that is certain. In all the life of your
fisherman the best piece of luck is just YOU.
CONTENTS
I. Fisherman's Luck
II. The Thrilling Moment
III. Talkability
IV. A Wild Strawberry
V. Lovers and Landscape
VI. A Fatal Success
VII. Fishing in Books
VIII. A Norwegian Honeymoon
IX. Who Owns the Mountains?
X. A Lazy, Idle Brook
XI. The Open Fire
XII. A Slumber Song
FISHERMAN'S LUCK
Has it ever fallen in your way to notice the quality of the
greetings that belong to certain occupations?
There is something about these salutations in kind which is
singularly taking and grateful to the ear. They are as much better
than an ordinary "good day" or a flat "how are you?" as a folk-song
of Scotland or the Tyrol is better than the futile love-ditty of the
drawing-room. They have a spicy and rememberable flavour. They
speak to the imagination and point the way to treasure-trove.
There is a touch of dignity in them, too, for all they are so free
and easy--the dignity of independence, the native spirit of one who
takes for granted that his mode of living has a right to make its
own forms of speech. I admire a man who does not hesitate to salute
the world in the dialect of his calling.
How salty and stimulating, for example, is the sailorman's hail of
"Ship ahoy!" It is like a breeze laden with briny odours and a
pleasant dash of spray. The miners in some parts of Germany have a
good greeting for their dusky trade. They cry to one who is going
down the shaft, "Gluck auf!" All the perils of an underground
adventure and all the joys of seeing the sun again are compressed
into a word. Even the trivial salutation which the telephone has
lately created and claimed for its peculiar use--"Hello, hello"--
seems to me to have a kind of fitness and fascination. It is like a
thoroughbred bulldog, ugly enough to be attractive. There is a
lively, concentrated, electric air about it. It makes courtesy wait
upon dispatch, and reminds us that we live in an age when it is
necessary to be wide awake.
I have often wished that every human employment might evolve its own
appropriate greeting. Some of them would be queer, no doubt; but at
least they would be an improvement on the wearisome iteration of
"Good-evening" and "Good-morning," and the monotonous inquiry, "How
do you do?"--a question so meaningless that it seldom tarries for an
answer. Under the new and more natural system of etiquette, when
you passed the time of day with a man you would know his business,
and the salutations of the market-place would be full of interest.
As for my chosen pursuit of angling (which I follow with diligence
when not interrupted by less important concerns), I rejoice with
every true fisherman that it has a greeting all its own and of a
most honourable antiquity. There is no written record of its
origin. But it is quite certain that since the days after the
Flood, when Deucalion
"Did first this art invent
Of angling, and his people taught the same,"
two honest and good-natured anglers have never met each other by the
way without crying out, "What luck?"
Here, indeed, is an epitome of the gentle art. Here is the spirit
of it embodied in a word and paying its respects to you with its
native accent. Here you see its secret charms unconsciously
disclosed. The attraction of angling for all the ages of man, from
the cradle to the grave, lies in its uncertainty. 'Tis an affair of
luck.
No amount of preparation in the matter of rods and lines and hooks
and lures and nets and creels can change its essential character.
No excellence of skill in casting the delusive fly or adjusting the
tempting bait upon the hook can make the result secure. You may
reduce the chances, but you cannot eliminate them. There are a
thousand points at which fortune may intervene. The state of the
weather, the height of the water, the appetite of the fish, the
presence or absence of other anglers--all these indeterminable
elements enter into the reckoning of your success. There is no
combination of stars in the firmament by which you can forecast the
piscatorial future. When you go a-fishing, you just take your
chances; you offer yourself as a candidate for anything that may be
going; you try your luck.
There are certain days that are favourites among anglers, who regard
them as propitious for the sport. I know a man who believes that
the fish always rise better on Sunday than on any other day in the
week. He complains bitterly of this supposed fact, because his
religious scruples will not allow him to take advantage of it. He
confesses that he has sometimes thought seriously of joining the
Seventh-Day Baptists.
Among the Pennsylvania Dutch, in the Alleghany Mountains, I have
found a curious tradition that Ascension Day is the luckiest in the
year for fishing. On that morning the district school is apt to he
thinly attended, and you must be on the stream very early if you do
not wish to find wet footprints on the stones ahead of you.
But in fact, all these superstitions about fortunate days are idle
and presumptuous. If there were such days in the calendar, a kind
and firm Providence would never permit the race of man to discover
them. It would rob life of one of its principal attractions, and
make fishing altogether too easy to be interesting.
Fisherman's luck is so notorious that it has passed into a proverb.
But the fault with that familiar saying is that it is too short and
too narrow to cover half the variations of the angler's possible
experience. For if his luck should be bad, there is no portion of
his anatomy, from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet,
that may not be thoroughly wet. But if it should be good, he may
receive an unearned blessing of abundance not only in his basket,
but also in his head and his heart, his memory and his fancy. He
may come home from some obscure, ill-named, lovely stream--some Dry
Brook, or Southwest Branch of Smith's Run--with a creel full of
trout, and a mind full of grateful recollections of flowers that
seemed to bloom for his sake, and birds that sang a new, sweet,
friendly message to his tired soul. He may climb down to "Tommy's
Rock" below the cliffs at Newport (as I have done many a day with my
lady Greygown), and, all unnoticed by the idle, weary promenaders in
the path of fashion, haul in a basketful of blackfish, and at the
same time look out across the shining sapphire waters and inherit a
wondrous good fortune of dreams--
"Have glimpses that will make him less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."
But all this, you must remember, depends upon something secret and
incalculable, something that we can neither command nor predict. It
is an affair of gift, not of wages. Fish (and the other good things
which are like sauce to the catching of them) cast no shadow before.
Water is the emblem of instability. No one can tell what he shall
draw out of it until he has taken in his line. Herein are found the
true charm and profit of angling for all persons of a pure and
childlike mind.
Look at those two venerable gentlemen floating in a skiff upon the
clear waters of Lake George. One of them is a successful statesman,
an ex-President of the United States, a lawyer versed in all the
curious eccentricities of the "lawless science of the law." The
other is a learned doctor of medicine, able to give a name to all
diseases from which men have imagined that they suffered, and to
invent new ones for those who are tired of vulgar maladies. But all
their learning is forgotten, their cares and controversies are laid
aside, in "innocuous desuetude." The Summer School of Sociology is
assembled. The Medical Congress is in session.
But they care not--no, not so much as the value of a single live
bait. The sun shines upon them with a fervent heat, but it irks
them not. The rain descends, and the winds blow and beat upon them,
but they are unmoved. They are securely anchored here in the lee of
Sabbath-Day Point.
What enchantment binds them to that inconsiderable spot? What magic
fixes their eyes upon the point of a fishing-rod, as if it were the
finger of destiny? It is the enchantment of uncertainty: the same
natural magic that draws the little suburban boys in the spring of
the year, with their strings and pin-hooks, around the shallow ponds
where dace and redfins hide; the same irresistible charm that fixes
a row of city gamins, like ragged and disreputable fish-crows, on
the end of a pier where blear-eyed flounders sometimes lurk in the
muddy water. Let the philosopher explain it as he will. Let the
moralist reprehend it as he chooses. There is nothing that attracts
human nature more powerfully than the sport of tempting the unknown
with a fishing-line.
Those ancient anglers have set out upon an exodus from the tedious
realm of the definite, the fixed, the must-certainly-come-to-pass.
They are on a holiday in the free country of peradventure. They do
not know at this moment whether the next turn of Fortune's reel will
bring up a perch or a pickerel, a sunfish or a black bass. It may
be a hideous catfish or a squirming eel, or it may be a lake-trout,
the grand prize in the Lake George lottery. There they sit, those
gray-haired lads, full of hope, yet equally prepared for
resignation; taking no thought for the morrow, and ready to make the
best of to-day; harmless and happy players at the best of all games
of chance.
"In other words," I hear some severe and sour-complexioned reader
say, "in plain language, they are a pair of old gamblers."
Yes, if it pleases you to call honest men by a bad name. But they
risk nothing that is not their own; and if they lose, they are not
impoverished. They desire nothing that belongs to other men; and if
they win, no one is robbed. If all gambling were like that, it
would be difficult to see the harm in it. Indeed, a daring moralist
might even assert, and prove by argument, that so innocent a delight
in the taking of chances is an aid to virtue.
Do you remember Martin Luther's reasoning on the subject of
"excellent large pike"? He maintains that God would never have
created them so good to the taste, if He had not meant them to be
eaten. And for the same reason I conclude that this world would
never have been left so full of uncertainties, nor human nature
framed so as to find a peculiar joy and exhilaration in meeting them
bravely and cheerfully, if it had not been divinely intended that
most of our amusement and much of our education should come from
this source.
"Chance" is a disreputable word, I know. It is supposed by many
pious persons to be improper and almost blasphemous to use it. But
I am not one of those who share this verbal prejudice. I am
inclined rather to believe that it is a good word to which a bad
reputation has been given. I feel grateful to that admirable
"psychologist who writes like a novelist," Mr. William James, for
his brilliant defence of it. For what does it mean, after all, but
that some things happen in a certain way which might have happened
in another way? Where is the immorality, the irreverence, the
atheism in such a supposition? Certainly God must be competent to
govern a world in which there are possibilities of various kinds,
just as well as one in which every event is inevitably determined
beforehand. St. Peter and the other fishermen-disciples on the Lake
of Galilee were perfectly free to cast their net on either side of
the ship. So far as they could see, so far as any one could see, it
was a matter of chance where they chose to cast it. But it was not
until they let it down, at the Master's word, on the right side that
they had good luck. And not the least element of their joy in the
draft of fishes was that it brought a change of fortune.
Leave the metaphysics of the question on the table for the present.
As a matter of fact, it is plain that our human nature is adapted to
conditions variable, undetermined, and hidden from our view. We are
not fitted to live in a world where a + b always equals c, and there
is nothing more to follow. The interest of life's equation arrives
with the appearance of x, the unknown quantity. A settled,
unchangeable, clearly foreseeable order of things does not suit our
constitution. It tends to melancholy and a fatty heart. Creatures
of habit we are undoubtedly; but it is one of our most fixed habits
to be fond of variety. The man who is never surprised does not know
the taste of happiness, and unless the unexpected sometimes happens
to us, we are most grievously disappointed.
Much of the tediousness of highly civilized life comes from its
smoothness and regularity. To-day is like yesterday, and we think
that we can predict to-morrow. Of course we cannot really do so.
The chances are still there. But we have covered them up so deeply
with the artificialities of life that we lose sight of them. It
seems as if everything in our neat little world were arranged, and
provided for, and reasonably sure to come to pass. The best way of
escape from this TAEDIUM VITAE is through a recreation like angling,
not only because it is so evidently a matter of luck, but also
because it tempts us into a wilder, freer life. It leads almost
inevitably to camping out, which is a wholesome and sanitary
imprudence.
It is curious and pleasant, to my apprehension, to observe how many
people in New England, one of whose States is called "the land of
Steady Habits," are sensible of the joy of changing them,--out of
doors. These good folk turn out from their comfortable farm-houses
and their snug suburban cottages to go a-gypsying for a fortnight
among the mountains or beside the sea. You see their white tents
gleaming from the pine-groves around the little lakes, and catch
glimpses of their bathing-clothes drying in the sun on the wiry
grass that fringes the sand-dunes. Happy fugitives from the bondage
of routine! They have found out that a long journey is not
necessary to a good vacation. You may reach the Forest of Arden in
a buckboard. The Fortunate Isles are within sailing distance in a
dory. And a voyage on the river Pactolus is open to any one who can
paddle a canoe.
I was talking--or rather listening--with a barber, the other day, in
the sleepy old town of Rivermouth. He told me, in one of those easy
confidences which seem to make the razor run more smoothly, that it
had been the custom of his family, for some twenty years past, to
forsake their commodious dwelling on Anchor Street every summer, and
emigrate six miles, in a wagon to Wallis Sands, where they spent the
month of August very merrily under canvas. Here was a sensible
household for you! They did not feel bound to waste a year's income
on a four weeks' holiday. They were not of those foolish folk who
run across the sea, carefully carrying with them the same tiresome
mind that worried them at home. They got a change of air by making
an alteration of life. They escaped from the land of Egypt by
stepping out into the wilderness and going a-fishing.
The people who always live in houses, and sleep on beds, and walk on
pavements, and buy their food from butchers and bakers and grocers,
are not the most blessed inhabitants of this wide and various earth.
The circumstances of their existence are too mathematical and secure
for perfect contentment. They live at second or third hand. They
are boarders in the world. Everything is done for them by somebody
else.
It is almost impossible for anything very interesting to happen to
them. They must get their excitement out of the newspapers, reading
of the hairbreadth escapes and moving accidents that befall people
in real life. What do these tame ducks really know of the adventure
of living? If the weather is bad, they are snugly housed. If it is
cold, there is a furnace in the cellar. If they are hungry, the
shops are near at hand. It is all as dull, flat, stale, and
unprofitable as adding up a column of figures. They might as well
be brought up in an incubator.
But when man abides in tents, after the manner of the early
patriarchs, the face of the world is renewed. The vagaries of the
clouds become significant. You watch the sky with a lover's look,
eager to know whether it will smile or frown. When you lie at night
upon your bed of boughs and hear the rain pattering on the canvas
close above your head, you wonder whether it is a long storm or only
a shower.
The rising wind shakes the tent-flaps. Are the pegs well driven
down and the cords firmly fastened? You fall asleep again and wake
later, to hear the rain drumming still more loudly on the tight
cloth, and the big breeze snoring through the forest, and the waves
plunging along the beach. A stormy day? Well, you must cut plenty
of wood and keep the camp-fire glowing, for it will be hard to start
it up again, if you let it get too low. There is little use in
fishing or hunting in such a storm. But there is plenty to do in
the camp: guns to be cleaned, tackle to be put in order, clothes to
be mended, a good story of adventure to be read, a belated letter to
be written to some poor wretch in a summer hotel, a game of hearts
or cribbage to be played, or a hunting-trip to be planned for the
return of fair weather. The tent is perfectly dry. A little trench
dug around it carries off the surplus water, and luckily it is
pitched with the side to the lake, so that you get the pleasant heat
of the fire without the unendurable smoke. Cooking in the rain has
its disadvantages. But how good the supper tastes when it is served
up on a tin plate, with an empty box for a table and a roll of
blankets at the foot of the bed for a seat!
A day, two days, three days, the storm may continue, according to
your luck. I have been out in the woods for a fortnight without a
drop of rain or a sign of dust. Again, I have tented on the shore
of a big lake for a week, waiting for an obstinate tempest to pass
by.
Look now, just at nightfall: is there not a little lifting and
breaking of the clouds in the west, a little shifting of the wind
toward a better quarter? You go to bed with cheerful hopes. A
dozen times in the darkness you are half awake, and listening
drowsily to the sounds of the storm. Are they waxing or waning? Is
that louder pattering a new burst of rain, or is it only the
plumping of the big drops as they are shaken from the trees? See,
the dawn has come, and the gray light glimmers through the canvas.
In a little while you will know your fate.
Look! There is a patch of bright yellow radiance on the peak of the
tent. The shadow of a leaf dances over it. The sun must be
shining. Good luck! and up with you, for it is a glorious morning.
The woods are glistening as fresh and fair as if they had been newcreated
overnight. The water sparkles, and tiny waves are dancing
and splashing all along the shore. Scarlet berries of the mountainash
hang around the lake. A pair of kingfishers dart back and forth
across the bay, in flashes of living blue. A black eagle swings
silently around his circle, far up in the cloudless sky. The air is
full of pleasant sounds, but there is no noise. The world is full
of joyful life, but there is no crowd and no confusion. There is no
factory chimney to darken the day with its smoke, no trolley-car to
split the silence with its shriek and smite the indignant ear with
the clanging of its impudent bell. No lumberman's axe has robbed
the encircling forests of their glory of great trees. No fires have
swept over the hills and left behind them the desolation of a
bristly landscape. All is fresh and sweet, calm and clear and
bright.
'Twas rather a rude jest of Nature, that tempest of yesterday. But
if you have taken it in good part, you are all the more ready for
her caressing mood to-day. And now you must be off to get your
dinner--not to order it at a shop, but to look for it in the woods
and waters. You are ready to do your best with rod or gun. You
will use all the skill you have as hunter or fisherman. But what
you shall find, and whether you shall subsist on bacon and biscuit,
or feast on trout and partridges, is, after all, a matter of luck.
I profess that it appears to me not only pleasant, but also
salutary, to be in this condition. It brings us home to the plain
realities of life; it teaches us that a man ought to work before he
eats; it reminds us that, after he has done all he can, he must
still rely upon a mysterious bounty for his daily bread. It says to
us, in homely and familiar words, that life was meant to be
uncertain, that no man can tell what a day will bring forth, and
that it is the part of wisdom to be prepared for disappointments and
grateful for all kinds of small mercies.
There is a story in that fragrant book, THE LITTLE FLOWERS OF ST.
FRANCIS, which I wish to transcribe here, without tying a moral to
it, lest any one should accuse me of preaching.
"Hence [says the quaint old chronicler], having assigned to his
companions the other parts of the world, St. Francis, taking Brother
Maximus as his comrade, set forth toward the province of France.
And coming one day to a certain town, and being very hungry, they
begged their bread as they went, according to the rule of their
order, for the love of God. And St. Francis went through one
quarter of the town, and Brother Maximus through another. But
forasmuch as St. Francis was a man mean and low of stature, and
hence was reputed a vile beggar by such as knew him not, he only
received a few scanty crusts and mouthfuls of dry bread. But to
Brother Maximus, who was large and well favoured, were given good
pieces and big, and an abundance of bread, yea, whole loaves.
Having thus begged, they met together without the town to eat, at a
place where there was a clear spring and a fair large stone, upon
which each spread forth the gifts that he had received. And St.
Francis, seeing that the pieces of bread begged by Brother Maximus
were bigger and better than his own, rejoiced greatly, saying, 'Oh,
Brother Maximus, we are not worthy of so great a treasure.' As he
repeated these words many times, Brother Maximus made answer:
'Father, how can you talk of treasures when there is such great
poverty and such lack of all things needful? Here is neither napkin
nor knife, neither board nor trencher, neither house nor table,
neither man-servant nor maid-servant.' St. Francis replied: 'And
this is what I reckon a great treasure, where naught is made ready
by human industry, but all that is here is prepared by Divine
Providence, as is plainly set forth in the bread which we have
begged, in the table of fair stone, and in the spring of clear
water. And therefore I would that we should pray to God that He
teach us with all our hearts to love the treasure of holy poverty,
which is so noble a thing, and whose servant is God the Lord.'"
I know of but one fairer description of a repast in the open air;
and that is where we are told how certain poor fishermen, coming in
very weary after a night of toil (and one of them very wet after
swimming ashore), found their Master standing on the bank of the
lake waiting for them. But it seems that he must have been busy in
their behalf while he was waiting; for there was a bright fire of
coals burning on the shore, and a goodly fish broiling thereon, and
bread to eat with it. And when the Master had asked them about
their fishing, he said, "Come, now, and get your breakfast." So
they sat down around the fire, and with his own hands he served them
with the bread and the fish.
Of all the banquets that have ever been given upon earth, that is
the one in which I would rather have had a share.
But it is now time that we should return to our fishing. And let us
observe with gratitude that almost all of the pleasures that are
connected with this pursuit--its accompaniments and variations,
which run along with the tune and weave an embroidery of delight
around it--have an accidental and gratuitous quality about them.
They are not to be counted upon beforehand. They are like something
that is thrown into a purchase by a generous and open-handed dealer,
to make us pleased with our bargain and inclined to come back to the
same shop.
If I knew, for example, before setting out for a day on the brook,
precisely what birds I should see, and what pretty little scenes in
the drama of woodland life were to be enacted before my eyes, the
expedition would lose more than half its charm. But, in fact, it is
almost entirely a matter of luck, and that is why it never grows
tiresome.
The ornithologist knows pretty well where to look for the birds, and
he goes directly to the places where he can find them, and proceeds
to study them intelligently and systematically. But the angler who
idles down the stream takes them as they come, and all his
observations have a flavour of surprise in them.
He hears a familiar song,--one that he has often heard at a
distance, but never identified,--a loud, cheery, rustic cadence
sounding from a low pine-tree close beside him. He looks up
carefully through the needles and discovers a hooded warbler, a
tiny, restless creature, dressed in green and yellow, with two white
feathers in its tail, like the ends of a sash, and a glossy little
black bonnet drawn closely about its golden head. He will never
forget that song again. It will make the woods seem homelike to
him, many a time, as he hears it ringing through the afternoon, like
the call of a small country girl playing at hide-and-seek: "See ME;
here I BE."
Another day he sits down on a mossy log beside a cold, trickling
spring to eat his lunch. It has been a barren day for birds.
Perhaps he has fallen into the fault of pursuing his sport too
intensely, and tramped along the stream looking for nothing but
fish. Perhaps this part of the grove has really been deserted by
its feathered inhabitants, scared away by a prowling hawk or driven
out by nest-hunters. But now, without notice, the luck changes. A
surprise-party of redstarts breaks into full play around him. All
through the dark-green shadow of the hemlocks they flash like little
candles--CANDELITAS, the Cubans call them. Their brilliant markings
of orange and black, and their fluttering, airy, graceful movements,
make them most welcome visitors. There is no bird in the bush
easier to recognize or pleasanter to watch. They run along the
branches and dart and tumble through the air in fearless chase of
invisible flies and moths. All the time they keep unfolding and
furling their rounded tails, spreading them out and waving them and
closing them suddenly, just as the Cuban girls manage their fans.
In fact, the redstarts are the tiny fantail pigeons of the forest.
There are other things about the birds, besides their musical
talents and their good looks, that the fisherman has a chance to
observe on his lucky days. He may sea something of their courage
and their devotion to their young.
I suppose a bird is the bravest creature that lives, in spite of its
natural timidity. From which we may learn that true courage is not
incompatible with nervousness, and that heroism does not mean the
absence of fear, but the conquest of it. Who does not remember the
first time that he ever came upon a hen-partridge with her brood, as
he was strolling through the woods in June? How splendidly the old
bird forgets herself in her efforts to defend and hide her young!
Smaller birds are no less daring. One evening last summer I was
walking up the Ristigouche from Camp Harmony to fish for salmon at
Mowett's Rock, where my canoe was waiting for me. As I stepped out
from a thicket on to the shingly bank of the river, a spotted
sandpiper teetered along before me, followed by three young ones.
Frightened at first, the mother flew out a few feet over the water.
But the piperlings could not fly, having no feathers; and they crept
under a crooked log. I rolled the log over very gently and took one
of the cowering creatures into my hand--a tiny, palpitating scrap of
life, covered with soft gray down, and peeping shrilly, like a
Liliputian chicken. And now the mother was transformed. Her fear
was changed into fury. She was a bully, a fighter, an Amazon in
feathers. She flew at me with loud cries, dashing herself almost
into my face. I was a tyrant, a robber, a kidnapper, and she called
heaven to witness that she would never give up her offspring without
a struggle. Then she changed her tactics and appealed to my baser
passions. She fell to the ground and fluttered around me as if her
wing were broken. "Look!" she seemed to say, "I am bigger than that
poor little baby. If you must eat something, eat me! My wing is
lame. I can't fly. You can easily catch me. Let that little bird
go!" And so I did; and the whole family disappeared in the bushes
as if by magic. I wondered whether the mother was saying to
herself, after the manner of her sex, that men are stupid things,
after all, and no match for the cleverness of a female who stoops to
deception in a righteous cause.
Now, that trivial experience was what I call a piece of good luck--
for me, and, in the event, for the sandpiper. But it is doubtful
whether it would be quite so fresh and pleasant in the remembrance,
if it had not also fallen to my lot to take two uncommonly good
salmon on that same evening, in a dry season.
Never believe a fisherman when he tells you that he does not care
about the fish he catches. He may say that he angles only for the
pleasure of being out-of-doors, and that he is just as well
contented when he takes nothing as when he makes a good catch. He
may think so, but it is not true. He is not telling a deliberate
falsehood. He is only assuming an unconscious pose, and indulging
in a delicate bit of self-flattery. Even if it were true, it would
not be at all to his credit.
Watch him on that lucky day when he comes home with a full basket of
trout on his shoulder, or a quartette of silver salmon covered with
green branches in the bottom of the canoe. His face is broader than
it was when he went out, and there is a sparkle of triumph in his
eye. "It is naught, it is naught," he says, in modest depreciation
of his triumph. But you shall see that he lingers fondly about the
place where the fish are displayed upon the grass, and does not fail
to look carefully at the scales when they are weighed, and has an
attentive ear for the comments of admiring spectators. You shall
find, moreover, that he is not unwilling to narrate the story of the
capture--how the big fish rose short, four times, to four different
flies, and finally took a small Black Dose, and played all over the
pool, and ran down a terribly stiff rapid to the next pool below,
and sulked for twenty minutes, and had to be stirred up with stones,
and made such a long fight that, when he came in at last, the hold
of the hook was almost worn through, and it fell out of his mouth as
he touched the shore. Listen to this tale as it is told, with
endless variations, by every man who has brought home a fine fish,
and you will perceive that the fisherman does care for his luck,
after all.
And why not? I am no friend to the people who receive the bounties
of Providence without visible gratitude. When the sixpence falls
into your hat, you may laugh. When the messenger of an unexpected
blessing takes you by the hand and lifts you up and bids you walk,
you may leap and run and sing for joy, even as the lame man, whom
St. Peter healed, skipped piously and rejoiced aloud as he passed
through the Beautiful Gate of the Temple. There is no virtue in
solemn indifference. Joy is just as much a duty as beneficence is.
Thankfulness is the other side of mercy.
When you have good luck in anything, you ought to be glad. Indeed,
if you are not glad, you are not really lucky.
But boasting and self-glorification I would have excluded, and most
of all from the behaviour of the angler. He, more than other men,
is dependent for his success upon the favour of an unseen
benefactor. Let his skill and industry be never so great, he can do
nothing unless LA BONNE CHANCE comes to him.
I was once fishing on a fair little river, the P'tit Saguenay, with
two excellent anglers and pleasant companions, H. E. G---- and C. S.
D----. They had done all that was humanly possible to secure good
sport. The stream had been well preserved. They had boxes full of
beautiful flies, and casting-lines imported from England, and a rod
for every fish in the river. But the weather was "dour," and the
water "drumly," and every day the lumbermen sent a "drive" of ten
thousand spruce logs rushing down the flooded stream. For three
days we had not seen a salmon, and on the fourth, despairing, we
went down to angle for sea-trout in the tide of the greater
Saguenay. There, in the salt water, where men say the salmon never
take the fly, H. E. G----, fishing with a small trout-rod, a poor,
short line, and an ancient red ibis of the common kind, rose and
hooked a lordly salmon of at least five-and-thirty pounds. Was not
this pure luck?
Pride is surely the most unbecoming of all vices in a fisherman.
For though intelligence and practice and patience and genius, and
many other noble things which modesty forbids him to mention, enter
into his pastime, so that it is, as Izaak Walton has firmly
maintained, an art; yet, because fortune still plays a controlling
hand in the game, its net results should never be spoken of with a
haughty and vain spirit. Let not the angler imitate Timoleon, who
boasted of his luck and lost it. It is tempting Providence to print
the record of your wonderful catches in the sporting newspapers; or
at least, if it must be done, there should stand at the head of the
column some humble, thankful motto, like "NON NOBIS, DOMINE." Even
Father Izaak, when he has a fish on his line, says, with a due sense
of human limitations, "There is a trout now, and a good one too, IF
I CAN BUT HOLD HIM!"
This reminds me that we left H. E. G----, a few sentences back,
playing his unexpected salmon, on a trout-rod, in the Saguenay.
Four times that great fish leaped into the air; twice he suffered
the pliant reed to guide him toward the shore, and twice ran out
again to deeper water. Then his spirit awoke within him: he bent
the rod like a willow wand, dashed toward the middle of the river,
broke the line as if it had been pack-thread, and sailed
triumphantly away to join the white porpoises that were tumbling in
the tide. "WHE-E-EW," they said, "WHE-E-EW! PSHA-A-AW!" blowing out
their breath in long, soft sighs as they rolled about like huge
snowballs in the black water. But what did H. E. G---- say? He sat
him quietly down upon a rock and reeled in the remnant of his line,
uttering these remarkable and Christian words: "Those porpoises,
said he, "describe the situation rather mildly. But it was good fun
while it lasted."
Again I remembered a saying of Walton: "Well, Scholar, you must
endure worse luck sometimes, or you will never make a good angler."
Or a good man, either, I am sure. For he who knows only how to
enjoy, and not to endure, is ill-fitted to go down the stream of
life through such a world as this.
I would not have you to suppose, gentle reader, that in discoursing
of fisherman's luck I have in mind only those things which may be
taken with a hook. It is a parable of human experience. I have
been thinking, for instance, of Walton's life as well as of his
angling: of the losses and sufferings that he, the firm Royalist,
endured when the Commonwealth men came marching into London town; of
the consoling days that were granted to him, in troublous times, on
the banks of the Lea and the Dove and the New River, and the good
friends that he made there, with whom he took sweet counsel in
adversity; of the little children who played in his house for a few
years, and then were called away into the silent land where he could
hear their voices no longer. I was thinking how quietly and
peaceably he lived through it all, not complaining nor desponding,
but trying to do his work well, whether he was keeping a shop or
writing hooks, and seeking to prove himself an honest man and a
cheerful companion, and never scorning to take with a thankful heart
such small comforts and recreations as came to him.
It is a plain, homely, old-fashioned meditation, reader, but not
unprofitable. When I talk to you of fisherman's luck, I do not
forget that there are deeper things behind it. I remember that what
we call our fortunes, good or ill, are but the wise dealings and
distributions of a Wisdom higher, and a Kindness greater, than our
own. And I suppose that their meaning is that we should learn, by
all the uncertainties of our life, even the smallest, how to be
brave and steady and temperate and hopeful, whatever comes, because
we believe that behind it all there lies a purpose of good, and over
it all there watches a providence of blessing.
In the school of life many branches of knowledge are taught. But
the only philosophy that amounts to anything, after all, is just the
secret of making friends with our luck.
THE THRILLING MOMENT
"In angling, as in all other recreations into which excitement
enters, we have to be on our guard, so that we can at any moment
throw a weight of self-control into the scale against misfortune;
and happily we can study to some purpose, both to increase our
pleasure in success and to lessen our distress caused by what goes
ill. It is not only in cases of great disasters, however, that the
angler needs self-control. He is perpetually called upon to use it
to withstand small exasperations."--SIR EDWARD GREY: Fly-Fishing.
Every moment of life, I suppose, is more or less of a turning-point.
Opportunities are swarming around us all the time, thicker than
gnats at sundown. We walk through a cloud of chances, and if we
were always conscious of them they would worry us almost to death.
But happily our sense of uncertainty is soothed and cushioned by
habit, so that we can live comfortably with it. Only now and then,
by way of special excitement, it starts up wide awake. We perceive
how delicately our fortune is poised and balanced on the pivot of a
single incident. We get a peep at the oscillating needle, and,
because we have happened to see it tremble, we call our experience a
crisis.
The meditative angler is not exempt from these sensational periods.
There are times when all the uncertainty of his chosen pursuit seems
to condense itself into one big chance, and stand out before him
like a salmon on the top wave of a rapid. He sees that his luck
hangs by a single strand, and he cannot tell whether it will hold or
break. This is his thrilling moment, and he never forgets it.
Mine came to me in the autumn of 1894, on the banks of the
Unpronounceable River, in the Province of Quebec. It was the last
day, of the open season for ouananiche, and we had set our hearts on
catching some good fish to take home with us. We walked up from the
mouth of the river, four preposterously long and rough miles, to the
famous fishing-pool, "LA PLACE DE PECHE A BOIVIN." It was a noble
day for walking; the air was clear and crisp, and all the hills
around us were glowing with the crimson foliage of those little
bushes which God created to make burned lands look beautiful. The
trail ended in a precipitous gully, down which we scrambled with
high hopes, and fishing-rods unbroken, only to find that the river
was in a condition which made angling absurd if not impossible.
There must have been a cloud-burst among the mountains, for the
water was coming down in flood. The stream was bank-full, gurgling
and eddying out among the bushes, and rushing over the shoal where
the fish used to lie, in a brown torrent ten feet deep. Our last
day with the land-locked salmon seemed destined to be a failure, and
we must wait eight months before we could have another. There were
three of us in the disappointment, and we shared it according to our
temperaments.
Paul virtuously resolved not to give up while there was a chance
left, and wandered down-stream to look for an eddy where he might
pick up a small fish. Ferdinand, our guide, resigned himself
without a sigh to the consolation of eating blueberries, which he
always did with great cheerfulness. But I, being more cast down
than either of my comrades, sought out a convenient seat among the
rocks, and, adapting my anatomy as well as possible to the
irregularities of nature's upholstery, pulled from my pocket AN
AMATEUR ANGLER'S DAYS IN DOVE DALE, and settled down to read myself
into a Christian frame of mind.
Before beginning, my eyes roved sadly over the pool once more. It
was but a casual glance. It lasted only for an instant. But in
that fortunate fragment of time I distinctly saw the broad tail of a
big ouananiche rise and disappear in the swift water at the very
head of the pool.
Immediately the whole aspect of affairs was changed. Despondency
vanished, and the river glittered with the beams of rising hope.
Such is the absurd disposition of some anglers. They never see a
fish without believing that they can catch him; but if they see no
fish, they are inclined to think that the river is empty and the
world hollow.
I said nothing to my companions. It would have been unkind to
disturb them with expectations which might never be realized. My
immediate duty was to get within casting distance of that salmon as
soon as possible.
The way along the shore of the pool was difficult. The bank was
very steep, and the rocks by the river's edge were broken and
glibbery. Presently I came to a sheer wall of stone, perhaps thirty
feet high, rising directly from the deep water.
There was a tiny ledge or crevice running part of the way across the
face of this wall, and by this four-inch path I edged along, holding
my rod in one hand, and clinging affectionately with the other to
such clumps of grass and little bushes as I could find. There was
one small huckleberry plant to which I had a particular attachment.
It was fortunately a firm little bush, and as I held fast to it I
remembered Tennyson's poem which begins
"Flower in the crannied wall,"
and reflected that if I should succeed in plucking out this flower,
"root and all," it would probably result in an even greater increase
of knowledge than the poet contemplated.
The ledge in the rock now came to an end. But below me in the pool
there was a sunken reef; and on this reef a long log had caught,
with one end sticking out of the water, within jumping distance. It
was the only chance. To go back would have been dangerous. An
angler with a large family dependent upon him for support has no
right to incur unnecessary perils.
Besides, the fish was waiting for me at the upper end of the pool!
So I jumped; landed on the end of the log; felt it settle slowly
down; ran along it like a small boy on a seesaw, and leaped off into
shallow water just as the log rolled from the ledge and lunged out
into the stream.
It went wallowing through the pool and down the rapid like a playful
hippopotamus. I watched it with interest and congratulated myself
that I was no longer embarked upon it. On that craft a voyage down
the Unpronounceable River would have been short but far from merry.
The "all ashore" bell was not rung early enough. I just got off,
with not half a second to spare.
But now all was well, for I was within reach of the fish. A little
scrambling over the rocks brought me to a point where I could easily
cast over him. He was lying in a swift, smooth, narrow channel
between two large stones. It was a snug resting-place, and no doubt
he would remain there for some time. So I took out my fly-book and
prepared to angle for him according to the approved rules of the
art.
Nothing is more foolish in sport than the habit of precipitation.
And yet it is a fault to which I am singularly subject. As a boy,
in Brooklyn, I never came in sight of the Capitoline Skating Pond,
after a long ride in the horse-cars, without breaking into a run
along the board walk, buckling on my skates in a furious hurry, and
flinging myself impetuously upon the ice, as if I feared that it
would melt away before I could reach it. Now this, I confess, is a
grievous defect, which advancing years have not entirely cured; and
I found it necessary to take myself firmly, as it were, by the
mental coat-collar, and resolve not to spoil the chance of catching
the only ouananiche in the Unpronounceable River by undue haste in
fishing for him.
I carefully tested a brand-new leader, and attached it to the line
with great deliberation and the proper knot. Then I gave my whole
mind to the important question of a wise selection of flies.
It is astonishing how much time and mental anxiety a man can spend
on an apparently simple question like this. When you are buying
flies in a shop it seems as if you never had half enough. You keep
on picking out a half-dozen of each new variety as fast as the
enticing salesman shows them to you. You stroll through the streets
of Montreal or Quebec and drop in at every fishing-tackle dealer's
to see whether you can find a few more good flies. Then, when you
come to look over your collection at the critical moment on the bank
of a stream, it seems as if you had ten times too many. And, spite
of all, the precise fly that you need is not there.
You select a couple that you think fairly good, lay them down beside
you in the grass, and go on looking through the book for something
better. Failing to satisfy yourself, you turn to pick up those that
you have laid out, and find that they have mysteriously vanished
from the face of the earth.
Then you struggle with naughty words and relapse into a condition of
mental palsy.
Precipitation is a fault. But deliberation, for a person of
precipitate disposition, is a vice.
The best thing to do in such a case is to adopt some abstract theory
of action without delay, and put it into practice without
hesitation. Then if you fail, you can throw the responsibility on
the theory.
Now, in regard to flies there are two theories. The old,
conservative theory is, that on a bright day you should use a dark,
dull fly, because it is less conspicuous. So I followed that theory
first and put on a Great Dun and a Dark Montreal. I cast them
delicately over the fish, but he would not look at them.
Then I perverted myself to the new, radical theory which says that
on a bright day you must use a light, gay fly, because it is more in
harmony with the sky, and therefore less noticeable. Accordingly I
put on a Professor and a Parmacheene Belle; but this combination of
learning and beauty had no attraction for the ouananiche.
Then I fell back on a theory of my own, to the effect that the
ouananiche have an aversion to red, and prefer yellow and brown. So
I tried various combinations of flies in which these colours
predominated.
Then I abandoned all theories and went straight through my book,
trying something from every page, and winding up with that lure
which the guides consider infallible,--"a Jock o' Scott that cost
fifty cents at Quebec." But it was all in vain. I was ready to
despair.
At this psychological moment I heard behind me a voice of hope,--the
song of a grasshopper: not one of those fat-legged, green-winged
imbeciles that feebly tumble in the summer fields, but a game
grasshopper,--one of those thin-shanked, brown-winged fellows that
leap like kangaroos, and fly like birds, and sing KRI-KAREE-KAREEKRI
in their flight.
It is not really a song, I know, but it sounds like one; and, if you
had heard that Kri-karee carolling as I chased him over the rocks,
you would have been sure that he was mocking me.
I believed that he was the predestined lure for that ouananiche; but
it was hard to persuade him to fulfill his destiny. I slapped at
him with my hat, but he was not there. I grasped at him on the
bushes, and brought away "nothing but leaves." At last he made his
way to the very edge of the water and poised himself on a stone,
with his legs well tucked in for a long leap and a bold flight to
the other side of the river. It was my final opportunity. I made a
desperate grab at it and caught the grasshopper.
My premonition proved to be correct. When that Kri-karee, invisibly
attached to my line, went floating down the stream, the ouananiche
was surprised. It was the fourteenth of September, and he had
supposed the grasshopper season was over. The unexpected temptation
was too strong for him. He rose with a rush, and in an instant I
was fast to the best land-locked salmon of the year.
But the situation was not without its embarrassments. My rod
weighed only four and a quarter ounces; the fish weighed between six
and seven pounds. The water was furious and headstrong. I had only
thirty yards of line and no landing-net.
"HOLA! FERDINAND!" I cried. "APPORTE LA NETTE, VITE! A BEAUTY!
HURRY UP!"
I thought it must be an hour while he was making his way over the
hill, through the underbrush, around the cliff. Again and again the
fish ran out my line almost to the last turn. A dozen times he
leaped from the water, shaking his silvery sides. Twice he tried to
cut the leader across a sunken ledge. But at last he was played
out, and came in quietly towards the point of the rock. At the same
moment Ferdinand appeared with the net.
Now, the use of the net is really the most difficult part of
angling. And Ferdinand is the best netsman in the Lake St. John
country. He never makes the mistake of trying to scoop a fish in
motion. He does not grope around with aimless, futile strokes as if
he were feeling for something in the dark. He does not entangle the
dropper-fly in the net and tear the tail-fly out of the fish's
mouth. He does not get excited.
He quietly sinks the net in the water, and waits until he can see
the fish distinctly, lying perfectly still and within reach. Then
he makes a swift movement, like that of a mower swinging the scythe,
takes the fish into the net head-first, and lands him without a
slip.
I felt sure that Ferdinand was going to do the trick in precisely
this way with my ouananiche. Just at the right instant he made one
quick, steady swing of the arms, and--the head of the net broke
clean off the handle and went floating away with the fish in it!
All seemed to be lost. But Ferdinand was equal to the occasion. He
seized a long, crooked stick that lay in a pile of driftwood on the
shore, sprang into the water up to his waist, caught the net as it
drifted past, and dragged it to land, with the ultimate ouananiche,
the prize of the season, still glittering through its meshes.
This is the story of my most thrilling moment as an angler.
But which was the moment of the deepest thrill?
Was it when the huckleberry bush saved me from a watery grave, or
when the log rolled under my feet and started down the river? Was
it when the fish rose, or when the net broke, or when the long stick
captured it?
No, it was none of these. It was when the Kri-karee sat with his
legs tucked under him on the brink of the stream. That was the
turning-point. The fortunes of the day depended on the comparative
quickness of the reflex action of his neural ganglia and mine. That
was the thrilling moment.
I see it now. A crisis is really the commonest thing in the world.
The reason why life sometimes seems dull to us is because we do not
perceive the importance and the excitement of getting bait.
TALKABILITY
A PRELUDE AND THEME WITH VARIATIONS
"He praises a meditative life, and with evident sincerity: but we
feel that he liked nothing so well as good talk."--JAMES RUSSELL
LOWELL: Walton.
I
PRELUDE--ON AN OLD, FOOLISH MAXIM
The inventor of the familiar maxim that "fishermen must not talk" is
lost in the mists of antiquity, and well deserves his fate. For a
more foolish rule, a conventionality more obscure and aimless in its
tyranny, was never imposed upon an innocent and honourable
occupation, to diminish its pleasure and discount its profits. Why,
in the name of all that is genial, should anglers go about their
harmless sport in stealthy silence like conspirators, or sit
together in a boat, dumb, glum, and penitential, like naughty
schoolboys on the bench of disgrace? 'Tis an Omorcan superstition;
a rule without a reason; a venerable, idiotic fashion invented to
repress lively spirits and put a premium on stupidity.
For my part, I incline rather to the opinion of the Neapolitan
fishermen who maintain that a certain amount of noise, of certain
kinds, is likely to improve the fishing, and who have a particular
song, very sweet and charming, which they sing to draw the fishes
around them. It is narrated, likewise, of the good St. Brandan,
that on his notable voyage from Ireland in search of Paradise, he
chanted the service for St. Peter's day so pleasantly that a
subaqueous audience of all sorts and sizes was attracted, insomuch
that the other monks began to be afraid, and begged the abbot that
he would sing a little lower, for they were not quite sure of the
intention of the congregation. Of St. Anthony of Padua it is said
that he even succeeded in persuading the fishes, in great
multitudes, to listen to a sermon; and that when it was ended (it
must be noted that it was both short and cheerful) they bowed their
heads and moved their bodies up and down with every mark of fondness
and approval of what the holy father had spoken.
If we can believe this, surely we need not be incredulous of things
which seem to be no less, but rather more, in harmony with the
course of nature. Creatures who are sensible to the attractions of
a sermon can hardly be indifferent to the charm of other kinds of
discourse. I can easily imagine a company of grayling wishing to
overhear a conversation between I. W. and his affectionate (but
somewhat prodigal) son and servant, Charles Cotton; and surely every
intelligent salmon in Scotland might have been glad to hear
Christopher North and the Ettrick Shepherd bandy jests and swap
stories. As for trout,--was there one in Massachusetts that would
not have been curious to listen to the intimate opinions of Daniel
Webster as he loafed along the banks of the Marshpee,--or is there
one in Pennsylvania to-day that might not be drawn with interest and
delight to the feet of Joseph Jefferson, telling how he conceived
and wrote RIP VAN WINKLE on the banks of a trout-stream?
Fishermen must be silent? On the contrary, it is far more likely
that good talk may promote good fishing.
All this, however, goes upon the assumption that fish can hear, in
the proper sense of the word. And this, it must be confessed, is an
assumption not yet fully verified. Experienced anglers and students
of fishy ways are divided upon the question. It is beyond a doubt
that all fishes, except the very lowest forms, have ears. But then
so have all men; and yet we have the best authority for believing
that there are many who "having ears, hear not."
The ears of fishes, for the most part, are inclosed in their skull,
and have no outward opening. Water conveys sound, as every country
boy knows who has tried the experiment of diving to the bottom of
the swimming-hole and knocking two big stones together. But I doubt
whether any country boy, engaged in this interesting scientific
experiment, has heard the conversation of his friends on the bank
who were engaged in hiding his clothes.
There are many curious and more or less venerable stories to the
effect that fishes may be trained to assemble at the ringing of a
bell or the beating of a drum. Lucian, a writer of the second
century, tells of a certain lake wherein many sacred fishes were
kept, of which the largest had names given to them, and came when
they were called. But Lucian was not a man of especially good
reputation, and there is an air of improbability about his statement
that the LARGEST fishes came. This is not the custom of the largest
fishes.
In the present century there was a tale of an eel in a garden-well,
in Scotland, which would come to be fed out of a spoon when the
children called him by his singularly inappropriate name of Rob Roy.
This seems a more likely story than Lucian's; at all events it comes
from a more orthodox atmosphere. But before giving it full
credence, I should like to know whether the children, when they
called "Rob Roy!" stood where the eel could see the spoon.
On the other side of the question, we may quote Mr. Ronalds, also a
Scotchman, and the learned author of THE FLY-FISHER'S ENTOMOLOGY,
who conducted a series of experiments which proved that even trout,
the most fugacious of fish, are not in the least disturbed by the
discharge of a gun, provided the flash is concealed. Mr. Henry P.
Wells, the author of THE AMERICAN SALMON ANGLER, says that he has
"never been able to make a sound in the air which seemed to produce
the slightest effect upon trout in the water."
So the controversy on the hearing of fishes continues, and the
conclusion remains open. Every man is at liberty to embrace that
side which pleases him best. You may think that the finny tribes
are as sensitive to sound as Fine Ear, in the German fairy-tale, who
could hear the grass grow. Or you may hold the opposite opinion,
that they are
"Deafer than the blue-eyed cat."
But whichever theory you adopt, in practice, if you are a wise
fisherman, you will steer a middle course, between one thing which
must be left undone and another thing which should be done. You
will refrain from stamping on the bank, or knocking on the side of
the boat, or dragging the anchor among the stones on the bottom; for
when the water vibrates the fish are likely to vanish. But you will
indulge as freely as you please in pleasant discourse with your
comrade; for it is certain that fishing is never hindered, and may
even be helped, in one way or another, by good talk.
I should therefore have no hesitation in advising any one to choose,
for companionship on an angling expedition, long or short, a person
who has the rare merit of being TALKABLE.
II
THEME--ON A SMALL, USEFUL VIRTUE
"Talkable" is not a new adjective. But it needs a new definition,
and the complement of a corresponding noun. I would fain set down
on paper some observations and reflections which may serve to make
its meaning clear, and render due praise to that most excellent
quality in man or woman,--especially in anglers,--the small but
useful virtue of TALKABILITY.
Robert Louis Stevenson uses the word "talkable" in one of his essays
to denote a certain distinction among the possible subjects of human
speech. There are some things, he says in effect, about which you
can really talk; and there are other things about which you cannot
properly talk at all, but only dispute, or harangue, or prose, or
moralize, or chatter.
After mature consideration I have arrived at the opinion that this
distinction among the themes of speech is an illusion. It does not
exist. All subjects, "the foolish things of the world, and the weak
things of the world, and base things of the world, yea, and things
that are not," may provide matter for good talk, if only the right
people are engaged in the enterprise. I know a man who can make a
description of the weather as entertaining as a tune on the violin;
and even on the threadbare theme of the waywardness of domestic
servants, I have heard a discreet woman play the most diverting and
instructive variations.
No, the quality of talkability does not mark a distinction among
things; it denotes a difference among people. It is not an
attribute unequally distributed among material objects and abstract
ideas. It is a virtue which belongs to the mind and moral character
of certain persons. It is a reciprocal human quality; active as
well as passive; a power of bestowing and receiving.
An amiable person is one who has a capacity for loving and being
loved. An affable person is one who is ready to speak and to be
spoken to,--as, for example, Milton's "affable archangel" Raphael;
though it must be confessed that he laid the chief emphasis on the
active side of his affability. A "clubable" person (to use a word
which Dr. Samuel Johnson invented but did not put into his
dictionary) is one who is fit for the familiar give and take of
club-life. A talkable person, therefore, is one whose nature and
disposition invite the easy interchange of thoughts and feelings,
one in whose company it is a pleasure to talk or to be talked to.
Now this good quality of talkability is to be distinguished, very
strictly and inflexibly, from the bad quality which imitates it and
often brings it into discredit. I mean the vice of talkativeness.
That is a selfish, one-sided, inharmonious affair, full of
discomfort, and productive of most unchristian feelings.
You may observe the operations of this vice not only in human
beings, but also in birds. All the birds in the bush can make some
kind of a noise; and most of them like to do it; and some of them
like it a great deal and do it very much. But it is not always for
edification, nor are the most vociferous and garrulous birds
commonly the most pleasing. A parrot, for instance, in your
neighbour's back yard, in the summer time, when the windows are
open, is not an aid to the development of Christian character. I
knew a man who had to stay in the city all summer, and in the autumn
was asked to describe the character and social standing of a new
family that had moved into his neighbourhood. Were they "nice
people," well-bred, intelligent, respectable? "Well," said he, "I
don't know what your standards are, and would prefer not to say
anything libellous; but I'll tell you in a word,--they are the kind
of people that keep a parrot."
Then there is the English Sparrow! What an insufferable chatterbox,
what an incurable scold, what a voluble and tiresome blackguard is
this little feathered cockney. There is not a sweet or pleasant
word in all his vocabulary.
I am convinced that he talks altogether of scandals and fights and
street-sweepings.
The kingdom of ornithology is divided into two departments,--real
birds and English sparrows. English sparrows are not real birds;
they are little beasts.
There was a church in Brooklyn which was once covered with a great
and spreading vine, in which the sparrows built innumerable nests.
These ungodly little birds kept up such a din that it was impossible
to hear the service of the sanctuary. The faithful clergy strained
their voices to the verge of ministerial sore throat, but the people
had no peace in their devotions until the vine was cut down, and the
Anglican intruders were evicted.
A talkative person is like an English sparrow,--a bird that cannot
sing, and will sing, and ought to be persuaded not to try to sing.
But a talkable person has the gift that belongs to the wood thrush
and the veery and the wren, the oriole and the white-throat and the
rose-breasted grosbeak, the mockingbird and the robin (sometimes);
and the brown thrush; yes, the brown thrush has it to perfection, if
you can catch him alone,--the gift of being interesting, charming,
delightful, in the most off-hand and various modes of utterance.
Talkability is not at all the same thing as eloquence. The eloquent
man surprises, overwhelms, and sometimes paralyzes us by the display
of his power. Great orators are seldom good talkers. Oratory in
exercise is masterful and jealous, and intolerant of all
interruptions. Oratory in preparation is silent, self-centred,
uncommunicative. The painful truth of this remark may he seen in
the row of countenances along the president's table at a public
banquet about nine o'clock in the evening. The bicycle-face seems
unconstrained and merry by comparison with the after-dinner-speechface.
The flow of table-talk is corked by the anxious conception of
post-prandial oratory.
Thackeray, in one of his ROUNDABOUT PAPERS, speaks of "the sin of
tall-talking," which, he says, "is the sin of schoolmasters,
governesses, critics, sermoners, and instructors of young or old
people." But this is not in accord with my observation. I should
say it was rather the sin of dilettanti who are ambitious of that
high-stepping accomplishment which is called "conversational
ability."
This has usually, to my mind, something set and artificial about it,
although in its most perfect form the art almost succeeds in
concealing itself. But, at all events, ''conversation'' is talk in
evening dress, with perhaps a little powder and a touch of rouge.
'T is like one of those wise virgins who are said to look their best
by lamplight. And doubtless this is an excellent thing, and not
without its advantages. But for my part, commend me to one who
loses nothing by the early morning illumination,--one who brings all
her attractions with her when she comes down to breakfast,--she is a
very pleasant maid.
Talk is that form of human speech which is exempt from all duties,
foreign and domestic. It is the nearest thing in the world to
thinking and feeling aloud. It is necessarily not for publication,--
solely an evidence of good faith and mutual kindness. You tell me
what you have seen and what you are thinking about, because you take
it for granted that it will interest and entertain me; and you
listen to my replies and the recital of my adventures and opinions,
because you know I like to tell them, and because you find something
in them, of one kind or another, that you care to hear. It is a
nice game, with easy, simple rules, and endless possibilities of
variation. And if we go into it with the right spirit, and play it
for love, without heavy stakes, the chances are that if we happen to
be fairly talkable people we shall have one of the best things in
the world,--a mighty good talk.
What is there in this anxious, hide-bound, tiresome existence of
ours, more restful and remunerative? Montaigne says, "The use of it
is more sweet than of any other action of life; and for that reason
it is that, if I were compelled to choose, I should sooner, I think,
consent to lose my sight than my hearing and speech." The very
aimlessness with which it proceeds, the serene disregard of all
considerations of profit and propriety with which it follows its
wandering course, and brings up anywhere or nowhere, to camp for the
night, is one of its attractions. It is like a day's fishing, not
valuable chiefly for the fish you bring home, but for the pleasant
country through which it leads you, and the state of personal wellbeing
and health in which it leaves you, warmed, and cheered, and
content with life and friendship.
The order in which you set out upon a talk, the path which you
pursue, the rules which you observe or disregard, make but little
difference in the end. You may follow the advice of Immanuel Kant
if you like, and begin with the weather and the roads, and go on to
current events, and wind up with history, art, and philosophy. Or
you may reverse the order if you prefer, like that admirable talker
Clarence King, who usually set sail on some highly abstract paradox,
such as "Civilization is a nervous disease," and landed in a tale of
adventure in Mexico or the Rocky Mountains. Or you may follow the
example of Edward Eggleston, who started in at the middle and worked
out at either end, and sometimes at both. It makes no difference.
If the thing is in you at all, you will find good matter for talk
anywhere along the route. Hear what Montaigne says again: "In our
discourse all subjects are alike to me; let there be neither weight
nor depth, 't is all one; there is yet grace and pertinence; all
there is tented with a mature and constant judgment, and mixed with
goodness, freedom, gayety, and friendship."
How close to the mark the old essayist sends his arrow! He is right
about the essential qualities of good talk. They are not merely
intellectual. They are moral. Goodness of heart, freedom of
spirit, gayety of temper, and friendliness of disposition,--these
are four fine things, and doubtless as acceptable to God as they are
agreeable to men. The talkability which springs out of these
qualities has its roots in a good soil. On such a plant one need
not look for the poison berries of malign discourse, nor for the
Dead Sea apples of frivolous mockery. But fair fruit will be there,
pleasant to the sight and good for food, brought forth abundantly
according to the season.
III
VARIATIONS--ON A PLEASANT PHRASE FROM MONTAIGNE
Montaigne has given as our text, "Goodness, freedom, gayety, and
friendship,"--these are the conditions which produce talkability.
And on this fourfold theme we may embroider a few variations, by way
of exposition and enlargement.
GOODNESS is the first thing and the most needful. An ugly, envious,
irritable disposition is not fitted for talk. The occasions for
offence are too numerous, and the way into strife is too short and
easy. A touch of good-natured combativeness, a fondness for brisk
argument, a readiness to try a friendly bout with any comer, on any
ground, is a decided advantage in a talker. It breaks up the
offensive monotony of polite concurrence, and makes things lively.
But quarrelsomeness is quite another affair, and very fatal.
I am always a little uneasy in a discourse with the Reverend
Bellicosus Macduff. It is like playing golf on links liable to
earthquakes. One never knows when the landscape will be thrown into
convulsions. Macduff has a tendency to regard a difference of
opinion as a personal insult. If he makes a bad stroke he seems to
think that the way to retrieve it is to deliver the next one on the
head of the other player. He does not tarry for the invitation to
lay on; and before you know what has happened you find yourself in a
position where you are obliged to cry, "Hold, enough!" and to be
liberally damned without any bargain to that effect. This is
discouraging, and calculated to make one wish that human intercourse
might be put, as far as Macduff is concerned, upon the gold basis of
silence.
On the other hand, what a delight it was to talk with that old
worthy, Chancellor Howard Crosby. He was a fighting man for four or
five generations hack, Dutch on one side, English on the other. But
there was not one little drop of gall in his blood. His opinions
were fixed to a degree; he loved to do battle for them; he never
changed them--at least never in the course of the same discussion.
He admired and respected a gallant adversary, and urged him on, with
quips and puns and daring assaults and unqualified statements, to do
his best. Easy victories were not to his taste. Even if he joined
with you in laying out some common falsehood for burial, you might
be sure that before the affair was concluded there would be every
prospect of what an Irishman would call "an elegant wake." If you
stood up against him on one of his favorite subjects of discussion
you must be prepared for hot work. You would have to take off your
coat. But when the combat was over he would be the man to help you
on with it again; and you would walk home together arm in arm,
through the twilight, smoking the pipe of peace. Talk like that
does good. It quickens the beating of the heart, and leaves no
scars upon it.
But this manly spirit, which loves
"To drink delight of battle with its peers,"
is a very different thing from that mean, bad, hostile temper which
loves to inflict wounds and injuries just for the sake of showing
power, and which is never so happy as when it is making some one
wince. There are such people in the world, and sometimes their
brilliancy tempts us to forget their malignancy. But to have much
converse with them is as if we should make playmates of rattlesnakes
for their grace of movement and swiftness of stroke.
I knew a man once (I will not name him even with an initial) who was
malignant to the core. Learned, industrious, accomplished, he kept
all his talents at the service of a perfect genius for hatred. If
you crossed his path but once, he would never cease to curse you.
The grave might close over you, but he would revile your epitaph and
mock at your memory. It was not even necessary that you should do
anything to incur his enmity. It was enough to be upright and
sincere and successful, to waken the wrath of this Shimei.
Integrity was an offence to him, and excellence of any kind filled
him with spleen. There was no good cause within his horizon that he
did not give a bad word to, and no decent man in the community whom
he did not try either to use or to abuse. To listen to him or to
read what he had written was to learn to think a little worse of
every one that he mentioned, and worst of all of him. He had the
air of a gentleman, the vocabulary of a scholar, the style of a
Junius, and the heart of a Thersites.
Talk, in such company, is impossible. The sense of something evil,
lurking beneath the play of wit, is like the knowledge that there
are snakes in the grass. Every step must be taken with fear. But
the real pleasure of a walk through the meadow comes from the
feeling of security, of ease, of safe and happy abandon to the mood
of the moment. This ungirdled and unguarded felicity in mutual
discourse depends, after all, upon the assurance of real goodness in
your companion. I do not mean a stiff impeccability of conduct.
Prudes and Pharisees are poor comrades. I mean simply goodness of
heart, the wholesome, generous, kindly quality which thinketh no
evil, rejoiceth not in iniquity, hopeth all things, endureth all
things, and wisheth well to all men. Where you feel this quality
you can let yourself go, in the ease of hearty talk.
FREEDOM is the second note that Montaigne strikes, and it is
essential to the harmony of talking. Very careful, prudent, precise
persons are seldom entertaining in familiar speech. They are like
tennis players in too fine clothes. They think more of their
costume than of the game.
A mania for absolutely correct pronunciation is fatal. The people
who are afflicted with this painful ailment are as anxious about
their utterance as dyspeptics about their diet. They move through
their sentences as delicately as Agag walked. Their little airs of
nicety, their starched cadences and frilled phrases seem as if they
had just been taken out of a literary bandbox. If perchance you
happen to misplace an accent, you shall see their eyebrows curl up
like an interrogation mark, and they will ask you what authority you
have for that pronunciation. As if, forsooth, a man could not talk
without book-license! As if he must have a permit from some dusty
lexicon before he can take a good word into his mouth and speak it
out like the people with whom he has lived!
The truth is that the man who is very particular not to commit
himself, in pronunciation or otherwise, and talks as if his remarks
were being taken down in shorthand, and shudders at the thought of
making a mistake, will hardly be able to open your heart or let out
the best that is in his own.
Reserve and precision are a great protection to overrated
reputations; but they are death to talk.
In talk it is not correctness of grammar nor elegance of enunciation
that charms us; it is spirit, VERVE, the sudden turn of humour, the
keen, pungent taste of life. For this reason a touch of dialect, a
flavour of brogue, is delightful. Any dialect is classic that has
conveyed beautiful thoughts. Who that ever talked with the poet
Tennyson, when he let himself go, over the pipes, would miss the
savour of his broad-rolling Lincolnshire vowels, now heightening the
humour, now deepening the pathos, of his genuine manly speech?
There are many good stories lingering in the memories of those who
knew Dr. James McCosh, the late president of Princeton University,--
stories too good, I fear, to get into a biography; but the best of
them, in print, would not have the snap and vigour of the poorest of
them, in talk, with his own inimitable Scotch-Irish brogue to set it
forth.
A brogue is not a fault. It is a beauty, an heirloom, a
distinction. A local accent is like a landed inheritance; it marks
a man's place in the world, tells where he comes from. Of course it
is possible to have too much of it. A man does not need to carry
the soil of his whole farm around with him on his boots. But,
within limits, the accent of a native region is delightful. 'T is
the flavour of heather in the grouse, the taste of wild herbs and
evergreen-buds in the venison. I like the maple-sugar tang of the
Vermonter's sharp-edged speech; the round, full-waisted r's of
Pennsylvania and Ohio; the soft, indolent vowels of the South. One
of the best talkers now living is a schoolmaster from Virginia,
Colonel Gordon McCabe. I once crossed the ocean with him on a
stream of stories that reached from Liverpool to New York. He did
not talk in the least like a book. He talked like a Virginian.
When Montaigne mentions GAYETY as the third clement of satisfying
discourse, I fancy he does not mean mere fun, though that has its
value at the right time and place. But there is another quality
which is far more valuable and always fit. Indeed it underlies the
best fun and makes it wholesome. It is cheerfulness, the temper
which makes the best of things and squeezes the little drops of
honey even out of thistle-blossoms. I think this is what Montaigne
meant. Certainly it is what he had.
Cheerfulness is the background of all good talk. A sense of humour
is a means of grace. With it I have heard a pleasant soul make even
that most perilous of all subjects, the description of a long
illness, entertaining. The various physicians moved through the
recital as excellent comedians, and the medicines appeared like a
succession of timely jests.
There is no occasion upon which this precious element of talkability
comes out stronger than when we are on a journey. Travel with a
cheerless and easily discouraged companion is an unadulterated
misery. But a cheerful comrade is better than a waterproof coat and
a foot-warmer.
I remember riding once with my lady Graygown fifteen miles through a
cold rainstorm, in an open buckboard, over the worst road in the
world, from LAC A LA BELLE RIVIERE to the Metabetchouan River. Such
was the cheerfulness of her ejaculations (the only possible form of
talk) that we arrived at our destination as warm and merry as if we
had been sitting beside a roaring camp-fire.
But after all, the very best thing in good talk, and the thing that
helps it most, is FRIENDSHIP. How it dissolves the barriers that
divide us, and loosens all constraint, and diffuses itself like some
fine old cordial through all the veins of life--this feeling that we
understand and trust each other, and wish each other heartily well!
Everything into which it really comes is good. It transforms
letter-writing from a task into a pleasure. It makes music a
thousand times more sweet. The people who play and sing not at us,
but TO us,--how delightful it is to listen to them! Yes, there is a
talkability that can express itself even without words. There is an
exchange of thought and feeling which is happy alike in speech and
in silence. It is quietness pervaded with friendship.
Having come thus far in the exposition of Montaigne, I shall
conclude with an opinion of my own, even though I cannot quote a
sentence of his to back it.
The one person of all the world in whom talkability is most
desirable, and talkativeness least endurable, is a wife.
A WILD STRAWBERRY
"Such is the story of the Boblink; once spiritual, musical, admired,
the joy of the meadows, and the favourite bird of spring; finally a
gross little sensualist who expiates his sensuality in the larder.
His story contains a moral, worthy the attention of all little birds
and little boys; warning them to keep to those refined and
intellectual pursuits which raised him to so high a pitch of
popularity during the early part of his career; but to eschew all
tendency to that gross and dissipated indulgence, which brought this
mistaken little bird to an untimely end."--WASHINGTON IRVING:
Wolfert's Roost.
The Swiftwater brook was laughing softly to itself as it ran through
a strip of hemlock forest on the edge of the Woodlings' farm. Among
the evergreen branches overhead the gayly-dressed warblers,--little
friends of the forest,--were flitting to and fro, lisping their June
songs of contented love: milder, slower, lazier notes than those in
which they voiced the amourous raptures of May. Prince's Pine and
golden loose-strife and pink laurel and blue hare-bells and purplefringed
orchids, and a score of lovely flowers were all abloom. The
late spring had hindered some; the sudden heats of early summer had
hastened others; and now they seemed to come out all together, as if
Nature had suddenly tilted up her cornucopia and poured forth her
treasures in spendthrift joy.
I lay on a mossy bank at the foot of a tree, filling my pipe after a
frugal lunch, and thinking how hard it would be to find in any
quarter of the globe a place more fair and fragrant than this hidden
vale among the Alleghany Mountains. The perfume of the flowers of
the forest is more sweet and subtle than the heavy scent of tropical
blossoms. No lily-field in Bermuda could give a fragrance half so
magical as the fairy-like odour of these woodland slopes, soft
carpeted with the green of glossy vines above whose tiny leaves, in
delicate profusion,
"The slight Linnaea hangs its twin-born heads."
Nor are there any birds in Africa, or among the Indian Isles, more
exquisite in colour than these miniature warblers, showing their
gold and green, their orange and black, their blue and white,
against the dark background of the rhododendron thicket.
But how seldom we put a cup of pleasure to our lips without a dash
of bitters, a touch of faultfinding. My drop of discontent, that
day, was the thought that the northern woodland, at least in June,
yielded no fruit to match its beauty and its fragrance.
There is good browsing among the leaves of the wood and the grasses
of the meadow, as every well-instructed angler knows. The bright
emerald tips that break from the hemlock and the balsam like verdant
flames have a pleasant savour to the tongue. The leaves of the
sassafras are full of spice, and the bark of the black-birch twigs
holds a fine cordial. Crinkle-root is spicy, but you must partake
of it delicately, or it will bite your tongue. Spearmint and
peppermint never lose their charm for the palate that still
remembers the delights of youth. Wild sorrel has an agreeable,
sour, shivery flavour. Even the tender stalk of a young blade of
grass is a thing that can be chewed by a person of childlike mind
with much contentment.
But, after all, these are only relishes. They whet the appetite
more than they appease it. There should be something to eat, in the
June woods, as perfect in its kind, as satisfying to the sense of
taste, as the birds and the flowers are to the senses of sight and
hearing and smell. Blueberries are good, but they are far away in
July. Blackberries are luscious when they are fully ripe, but that
will not be until August. Then the fishing will be over, and the
angler's hour of need will be past. The one thing that is lacking
now beside this mountain stream is some fruit more luscious and
dainty than grows in the tropics, to melt upon the lips and fill the
mouth with pleasure.
But that is what these cold northern woods will not offer. They are
too reserved, too lofty, too puritanical to make provision for the
grosser wants of humanity. They are not friendly to luxury.
Just then, as I shifted my head to find a softer pillow of moss
after this philosophic and immoral reflection, Nature gave me her
silent answer. Three wild strawberries, nodding on their long
stems, hung over my face. It was an invitation to taste and see
that they were good.
The berries were not the round and rosy ones of the meadow, but the
long, slender, dark crimson ones of the forest. One, two, three; no
more on that vine; but each one as it touched my lips was a drop of
nectar and a crumb of ambrosia, a concentrated essence of all the
pungent sweetness of the wildwood, sapid, penetrating, and
delicious. I tasted the odour of a hundred blossoms and the green
shimmering of innumerable leaves and the sparkle of sifted sunbeams
and the breath of highland breezes and the song of many birds and
the murmur of flowing streams,--all in a wild strawberry.
Do you remember, in THE COMPLEAT ANGLER, a remark which Isaak Walton
quotes from a certain "Doctor Boteler" about strawberries?
"Doubtless," said that wise old man, "God could have made a better
berry, but doubtless God never did."
Well, the wild strawberry is the one that God made.
I think it would have been pleasant to know a man who could sum up
his reflections upon the important question of berries in such a
pithy saying as that which Walton repeats. His tongue must have
been in close communication with his heart. He must have had a fair
sense of that sprightly humour without which piety itself is often
insipid.
I have often tried to find out more about him, and some day I hope I
shall. But up to the present, all that the books have told me of
this obscure sage is that his name was William Butler, and that he
was an eminent physician, sometimes called "the Aesculapius of his
age." He was born at Ipswich, in l535, and educated at Clare Hall,
Cambridge; in the neighbourhood of which town he appears to have
spent the most of his life, in high repute as a practitioner of
physic. He had the honour of doctoring King James the First after
an accident on the hunting field, and must have proved himself a
pleasant old fellow, for the king looked him up at Cambridge the
next year, and spent an hour in his lodgings. This wise physician
also invented a medicinal beverage called "Doctor Butler's Ale." I
do not quite like the sound of it, but perhaps it was better than
its name. This much is sure, at all events: either it was really a
harmless drink, or else the doctor must have confined its use
entirely to his patients; for he lived to the ripe age of eightythree
years.
Between the time when William Butler first needed the services of a
physician, in 1535, and the time when he last prescribed for a
patient, in 1618, there was plenty of trouble in England. Bloody
Queen Mary sat on the throne; and there were all kinds of quarrels
about religion and politics; and Catholics and Protestants were
killing one another in the name of God. After that the red-haired
Elizabeth, called the Virgin Queen, wore the crown, and waged
triumphant war and tempestuous love. Then fat James of Scotland was
made king of Great Britain; and Guy Fawkes tried to blow him up with
gunpowder, and failed; and the king tried to blow out all the pipes
in England with his COUNTERBLAST AGAINST TOBACCO; but he failed too.
Somewhere about that time, early in the seventeenth century, a very
small event happened. A new berry was brought over from Virginia,--
FRAGRARIA VIRGINIANA,--and then, amid wars and rumours of wars,
Doctor Butler's happiness was secure. That new berry was so much
richer and sweeter and more generous than the familiar FRAGRARIA
VESCA of Europe, that it attracted the sincere interest of all
persons of good taste. It inaugurated a new era in the history of
the strawberry. The long lost masterpiece of Paradise was restored
to its true place in the affections of man.
Is there not a touch of merry contempt for all the vain
controversies and conflicts of humanity in the grateful ejaculation
with which the old doctor greeted that peaceful, comforting gift of
Providence?
"From this time forward," he seems to say, "the fates cannot beggar
me, for I have eaten strawberries. With every Maytime that visits
this distracted island, the white blossoms with hearts of gold will
arrive. In every June the red drops of pleasant savour will hang
among the scalloped leaves. The children of this world may wrangle
and give one another wounds that even my good ale cannot cure.
Nevertheless, the earth as God created it is a fair dwelling and
full of comfort for all who have a quiet mind and a thankful heart.
Doubtless God might have made a better world, but doubtless this is
the world He made for us; and in it He planted the strawberry."
Fine old doctor! Brave philosopher of cheerfulness! The Virginian
berry should have been brought to England sooner, or you should have
lived longer, at least to a hundred years, so that you might have
welcomed a score of strawberry-seasons with gratitude and an
epigram.
Since that time a great change has passed over the fruit which
Doctor Butler praised so well. That product of creative art which
Divine wisdom did not choose to surpass, human industry has laboured
to improve. It has grown immensely in size and substance. The
traveller from America who steams into Queenstown harbour in early
summer is presented (for a consideration) with a cabbage-leaf full
of pale-hued berries, sweet and juicy, any one of which would
outbulk a dozen of those that used to grow in Virginia when
Pocahontas was smitten with the charms of Captain John Smith. They
are superb, those light-tinted Irish strawberries. And there are
wonderful new varieties developed in the gardens of New Jersey and
Rhode Island, which compare with the ancient berries of the woods
and meadows as Leviathan with a minnow. The huge crimson cushions
hang among the plants so thick that they seem like bunches of fruit
with a few leaves attached for ornament. You can satisfy your
hunger in such a berry-patch in ten minutes, while out in the field
you must pick for half an hour, and in the forest thrice as long,
before you can fill a small tin cup.
Yet, after all, it is questionable whether men have really bettered
God's CHEF D'OEUVRE in the berry line. They have enlarged it and
made it more plentiful and more certain in its harvest. But
sweeter, more fragrant, more poignant in its flavour? No. The wild
berry still stands first in its subtle gusto.
Size is not the measure of excellence. Perfection lies in quality,
not in quantity. Concentration enhances pleasure, gives it a point
so that it goes deeper.
Is not a ten-inch trout better than a ten-foot sturgeon? I would
rather read a tiny essay by Charles Lamb than a five-hundred page
libel on life by a modern British novelist who shall be nameless.
Flavour is the priceless quality. Style is the thing that counts
and is remembered, in literature, in art, and in berries.
No JOCUNDA, nor TRIUMPH, nor VICTORIA, nor any other high-titled
fruit that ever took the first prize at an agricultural fair, is
half so delicate and satisfying as the wild strawberry that dropped
into my mouth, under the hemlock tree, beside the Swiftwater.
A touch of surprise is essential to perfect sweetness.
To get what you have been wishing for is pleasant; but to get what
you have not been sure of, makes the pleasure tingle. A new door of
happiness is opened when you go out to hunt for something and
discover it with your own eyes. But there is an experience even
better than that. When you have stupidly forgotten (or despondently
forgone) to look about you for the unclaimed treasures and unearned
blessings which are scattered along the by-ways of life, then,
sometimes by a special mercy, a small sample of them is quietly laid
before you so that you cannot help seeing it, and it brings you back
to a sense of the joyful possibilities of living.
How full of enjoyment is the search after wild things,--wild birds,
wild flowers, wild honey, wild berries! There was a country club on
Storm King Mountain, above the Hudson River, where they used to
celebrate a festival of flowers every spring. Men and women who had
conservatories of their own, full of rare plants and costly orchids,
came together to admire the gathered blossoms of the woodlands and
meadows. But the people who had the best of the entertainment were
the boys and girls who wandered through the thickets and down the
brooks, pushed their way into the tangled copses and crept
venturesomely across the swamps, to look for the flowers. Some of
the seekers may have had a few gray hairs; but for that day at least
they were all boys and girls. Nature was as young as ever, and they
were all her children. Hand touched hand without a glove. The
hidden blossoms of friendship unfolded. Laughter and merry shouts
and snatches of half-forgotten song rose to the lips. Gay adventure
sparkled in the air. School was out and nobody listened for the
bell. It was just a day to live, and be natural, and take no
thought for the morrow.
There is great luck in this affair of looking for flowers. I do not
see how any one who is prejudiced against games of chance can
consistently undertake it.
For my own part, I approve of garden flowers because they are so
orderly and so certain; but wild flowers I love, just because there
is so much chance about them. Nature is all in favour of certainty
in great laws and of uncertainty in small events. You cannot
appoint the day and the place for her flower-shows. If you happen
to drop in at the right moment she will give you a free admission.
But even then it seems as if the table of beauty had been spread for
the joy of a higher visitor, and in obedience to secret orders which
you have not heard.
Have you ever found the fringed gentian?
"Just before the snows,
There came a purple creature
That lavished all the hill:
And summer hid her forehead,
And mockery was still.
The frosts were her condition:
The Tyrian would not come
Until the North evoked her,--
'Creator, shall I bloom?'"
There are strange freaks of fortune in the finding of wild flowers,
and curious coincidences which make us feel as if some one were
playing friendly tricks on us. I remember reading, one evening in
May, a passage in a good book called THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS,
in which Colonel Higginson describes the singular luck that a friend
of his enjoyed, year after year, in finding the rare blossoms of the
double rueanemone. It seems that this man needed only to take a
walk in the suburbs of any town, and he would come upon a bed of
these flowers, without effort or design. I envied him his good
fortune, for I had never discovered even one of them. But the next
morning, as I strolled out to fish the Swiftwater, down below Billy
Lerns's spring-house I found a green bank in the shadow of the wood
all bespangled with tiny, trembling, twofold stars,--double
rueanemones, for luck! It was a favourable omen, and that day I
came home with a creel full of trout.
The theory that Adam lived out in the woods for some time before he
was put into the garden of Eden "to dress it and to keep it" has an
air of probability. How else shall we account for the arboreal
instincts that cling to his posterity?
There is a wilding strain in our blood that all the civilization in
the world will not eradicate. I never knew a real boy--or, for that
matter, a girl worth knowing--who would not rather climb a tree, any
day, than walk up a golden stairway.
It is a touch of this instinct, I suppose, that makes it more
delightful to fish in the most insignificant of free streams than in
a carefully stocked and preserved pond, where the fish are brought
up by hand and fed on minced liver. Such elaborate precautions to
ensure good luck extract all the spice from the sport of angling.
Casting the fly in such a pond, if you hooked a fish, you might
expect to hear the keeper say, "Ah, that is Charles, we will play
him and put him back, if you please, sir; for the master is very
fond of him,"--or, "Now you have got hold of Edward; let us land him
and keep him; he is three years old this month, and just ready to be
eaten." It would seem like taking trout out of cold storage.
Who could find any pleasure in angling for the tame carp in the
fish-pool of Fontainebleau? They gather at the marble steps, those
venerable, courtly fish, to receive their rations; and there are
veterans among them, in ancient livery, with fringes of green moss
on their shoulders, who could tell you pretty tales of being fed by
the white hands of maids of honour, or even of nibbling their crumbs
of bread from the jewelled fingers of a princess.
There is no sport in bringing pets to the table. It may be
necessary sometimes; but the true sportsman would always prefer to
leave the unpleasant task of execution to menial hands, while he
goes out into the wild country to capture his game by his own
skill,--if he has good luck. I would rather run some risk in this
enterprise (even as the young Tobias did, when the voracious pike
sprang at him from the waters of the Tigris, and would have devoured
him but for the friendly instruction of the piscatory Angel, who
taught Tobias how to land the monster),--I would far rather take any
number of chances in my sport than have it domesticated to the point
of dulness.
The trim plantations of trees which are called "forests" in certain
parts of Europe--scientifically pruned and tended, counted every
year by uniformed foresters, and defended against all possible
depredations--are admirable and useful in their way; but they lack
the mystic enchantment of the fragments of native woodland which
linger among the Adirondacks and the White Mountains, or the vast,
shaggy, sylvan wildernesses which hide the lakes and rivers of
Canada. These Laurentian Hills lie in No Man's Land. Here you do
not need to keep to the path, for there is none. You may make your
own trail, whithersoever fancy leads you; and at night you may pitch
your tent under any tree that looks friendly and firm.
Here, if anywhere, you shall find Dryads, and Naiads, and Oreads.
And if you chance to see one, by moonlight, combing her long hair
beside the glimmering waterfall, or slipping silently, with gleaming
shoulders, through the grove of silver birches, you may call her by
the name that pleases you best. She is all your own discovery.
There is no social directory in the wilderness.
One side of our nature, no doubt, finds its satisfaction in the
regular, the proper, the conventional. But there is another side of
our nature, underneath, that takes delight in the strange, the free,
the spontaneous. We like to discover what we call a law of Nature,
and make our calculations about it, and harness the force which lies
behind it for our own purposes. But we taste a different kind of
joy when an event occurs which nobody has foreseen or counted upon.
It seems like an evidence that there is something in the world which
is alive and mysterious and untrammelled.
The weather-prophet tells us of an approaching storm. It comes
according to the programme. We admire the accuracy of the
prediction, and congratulate ourselves that we have such a good
meteorological service. But when, perchance, a bright, crystalline
piece of weather arrives instead of the foretold tempest, do we not
feel a secret sense of pleasure which goes beyond our mere comfort
in the sunshine? The whole affair is not as easy as a sum in simple
addition, after all,--at least not with our present knowledge. It
is a good joke on the Weather Bureau. "Aha, Old Probabilities!" we
say, "you don't know it all yet; there are still some chances to be
taken!"
Some day, I suppose, all things in the heavens above, and in the
earth beneath, and in the hearts of the men and women who dwell
between, will be investigated and explained. We shall live a
perfectly ordered life, with no accidents, happy or unhappy.
Everybody will act according to rule, and there will be no dotted
lines on the map of human existence, no regions marked "unexplored."
Perhaps that golden age of the machine will come, but you and I will
hardly live to see it. And if that seems to you a matter for tears,
you must do your own weeping, for I cannot find it in my heart to
add a single drop of regret.
The results of education and social discipline in humanity are fine.
It is a good thing that we can count upon them. But at the same
time let us rejoice in the play of native traits and individual
vagaries. Cultivated manners are admirable, yet there is a sudden
touch of inborn grace and courtesy that goes beyond them all. No
array of accomplishments can rival the charm of an unsuspected gift
of nature, brought suddenly to light. I once heard a peasant girl
singing down the Traunthal, and the echo of her song outlives, in
the hearing of my heart, all memories of the grand opera.
The harvest of the gardens and the orchards, the result of prudent
planting and patient cultivation, is full of satisfaction. We
anticipate it in due season, and when it comes we fill our mouths
and are grateful. But pray, kind Providence, let me slip over the
fence out of the garden now and then, to shake a nut-tree that grows
untended in the wood. Give me liberty to put off my black coat for
a day, and go a-fishing on a free stream, and find by chance a wild
strawberry.
LOVERS AND LANDSCAPE
"He insisted that the love that was of real value in the world was
n't interesting, and that the love that was interesting was n't
always admirable. Love that happened to a person like the measles
or fits, and was really of no particular credit to itself or its
victims, was the sort that got into the books and was made much of;
whereas the kind that was attained by the endeavour of true souls,
and that had wear in it, and that made things go right instead of
tangling them up, was too much like duty to make satisfactory
reading for people of sentiment."--E. S. MARTIN: My Cousin Anthony.
The first day of spring is one thing, and the first spring day is
another. The difference between them is sometimes as great as a
month.
The first day of spring is due to arrive, if the calendar does not
break down, about the twenty-first of March, when the earth turns
the corner of Sun Alley and starts for Summer Street. But the first
spring day is not on the time-table at all. It comes when it is
ready, and in the latitude of New York this is usually not till
after All Fools' Day.
About this time,--
"When chinks in April's windy dome
Let through a day of June,
And foot and thought incline to roam,
And every sound's a tune,"--
it is the habit of the angler who lives in town to prepare for the
labours of the approaching season by longer walks or bicycle-rides
in the parks, or along the riverside, or in the somewhat demoralized
Edens of the suburbs. In the course of these vernal peregrinations
and circumrotations, I observe that lovers of various kinds begin to
occupy a notable place in the landscape.
The burnished dove puts a livelier iris around his neck, and
practises fantastic bows and amourous quicksteps along the verandah
of the pigeon-house and on every convenient roof. The young male of
the human species, less gifted in the matter of rainbows, does his
best with a gay cravat, and turns the thoughts which circulate above
it towards the securing or propitiating of a best girl.
The objects of these more or less brilliant attentions, doves and
girls, show a becoming reciprocity, and act in a way which leads us
to infer (so far as inferences hold good in the mysterious region of
female conduct) that they are not seriously displeased. To a
rightly tempered mind, pleasure is a pleasant sight. And the
philosophic observer who could look upon this spring spectacle of
the lovers with any but friendly feelings would be indeed what the
great Dr. Samuel Johnson called "a person not to be envied."
Far be it from me to fall into such a desiccated and supercilious
mood. My small olive-branch of fancy will be withered, in truth,
and ready to drop budless from the tree, when I cease to feel a mild
delight in the billings and cooings of the little birds that
separate from the flocks to fly together in pairs, or in the
uninstructive but mutually satisfactory converse which Strephon
holds with Chloe while they dally along the primrose path.
I am glad that even the stony and tumultuous city affords some
opportunities for these amiable observations. In the month of April
there is hardly a clump of shrubbery in the Central Park which will
not serve as a trysting-place for yellow warblers and catbirds just
home from their southern tours. At the same time, you shall see
many a bench, designed for the accommodation of six persons,
occupied at the sunset hour by only two, and apparently so much too
small for them that they cannot avoid a little crowding.
These are infallible signs. Taken in conjunction with the eruption
of tops and marbles among the small boys, and the purchase of
fishing-tackle and golf-clubs by the old boys, they certify us that
the vernal equinox has arrived, not only in the celestial regions,
but also in the heart of man.
I have been reflecting of late upon the relation of lovers to the
landscape, and questioning whether art has given it quite the same
place as that which belongs to it in nature. In fiction, for
example, and in the drama, and in music, I have some vague
misgivings that romantic love has come to hold a more prominent and
a more permanent position than it fills in real life.
This is dangerous ground to venture upon, even in the most modest
and deprecatory way. The man who expresses an opinion, or even a
doubt, on this subject, contrary to the ruling traditions, will have
a swarm of angry critics buzzing about him. He will be called a
heretic, a heathen, a cold-blooded freak of nature. As for the
woman who hesitates to subscribe all the thirty-nine articles of
romantic love, if such a one dares to put her reluctance into words,
she is certain to be accused either of unwomanly ambition or of
feminine disappointment.
Let us make haste, then, to get back for safety to the
ornithological aspect of the subject. Here there can be no
penalties for heresy. And here I make bold to avow my conviction
that the pairing season is not the only point of interest in the
life of the birds; nor is the instinct by which they mate altogether
and beyond comparison the noblest passion that stirs their feathered
breasts.
'T is true, the time of mating is their prettiest season; but it is
very short. How little we should know of the drama of their airy
life if we had eyes only for this brief scene! Their finest
qualities come out in the patient cares that protect the young in
the nest, in the varied struggles for existence through the changing
year, and in the incredible heroisms of the annual migrations.
Herein is a parable.
It may be observed further, without fear of rebuke, that the
behaviour of the different kinds of birds during the prevalence of
romantic love is not always equally above reproach. The courtship
of English sparrows--blustering, noisy, vulgar--is a sight to offend
the taste of every gentle on-looker. Some birds reiterate and
vociferate their love-songs in a fashion that displays their
inconsiderateness as well as their ignorance of music. This trait
is most marked in domestic fowls. There was a guinea-cock, once,
that chose to do his wooing close under the window of a farm-house
where I was lodged. He had no regard for my hours of sleep or
meditation. His amatory click-clack prevented the morning and
wrecked the tranquillity of the evening. It was odious, brutal,--
worse, it was absolutely thoughtless. Herein is another parable.
Let us admit cheerfully that lovers have a place in the landscape
and lend a charm to it. This does not mean that they are to take up
all the room there is. Suppose, for example, that a pair of them,
on Goat Island, put themselves in such a position as to completely
block out your view of Niagara. You cannot regard them with
gratitude. They even become a little tedious. Or suppose that you
are visiting at a country-house, and you find that you must not
enjoy the moonlight on the verandah because Augustus and Amanda are
murmuring in one corner, and that you must not go into the garden
because Louis and Lizzie are there, and that you cannot have a sail
on the lake because Richard and Rebecca have taken the boat.
Of course, unless you happen to be a selfish old curmudgeon, you
rejoice, by sympathy, in the happiness of these estimable young
people. But you fail to see why it should cover so much ground.
Why should they not pool their interests, and all go out in the
boat, or all walk in the garden, or all sit on the verandah? Then
there would be room for somebody else about the place.
In old times you could rely upon lovers for retirement. But
nowadays their role seems to be a bold ostentation of their
condition. They rely upon other people to do the timid, shrinking
part. Society, in America, is arranged principally for their
convenience; and whatever portion of the landscape strikes their
fancy, they preempt and occupy. All this goes upon the presumption
that romantic love is really the only important interest in life.
This train of thought was illuminated, the other night, by an
incident which befell me at a party. It was an assembly of men,
drawn together by their common devotion to the sport of canoeing.
There were only three or four of the gentler sex present (as
honorary members), and only one of whom it could be suspected that
she was at that time a victim or an object of the tender passion.
In the course of the evening, by way of diversion to our
disputations on keels and centreboards, canvas and birch-bark,
cedar-wood and bass-wood, paddles and steering-gear, a fine young
Apollo, with a big, manly voice, sang us a few songs. But he did
not chant the joys of weathering a sudden squall, or running a rapid
feather-white with foam, or floating down a long, quiet, elm-bowered
river. Not all. His songs were full of sighs and yearnings,
languid lips and sheep's-eyes. His powerful voice informed us that
crowns of thorns seemed like garlands of roses, and kisses were as
sweet as samples of heaven, and various other curious sensations
were experienced; and at the end of every stanza the reason was
stated, in tones of thunder--
"Because I love you, dear."
Even if true, it seemed inappropriate. How foolish the average
audience in a drawing-room looks while it is listening to passionate
love-ditties! And yet I suppose the singer chose these songs, not
from any malice aforethought, but simply because songs of this kind
are so abundant that it is next to impossible to find anything else
in the shops.
In regard to novels, the situation is almost as discouraging. Ten
love-stories are printed to one of any other kind. We have a
standing invitation to consider the tribulations and difficulties of
some young man or young woman in finding a mate. It must be
admitted that the subject has its capabilities of interest. Nature
has her uses for the lover, and she gives him an excellent part to
play in the drama of life. But is this tantamount to saying that
his interest is perennial and all-absorbing, and that his role on
the stage is the only one that is significant and noteworthy?
Life is much too large to be expressed in the terms of a single
passion. Friendship, patriotism, parental tenderness, filial
devotion, the ardour of adventure, the thirst for knowledge, the
ecstasy of religion,--these all have their dwelling in the heart of
man. They mould character. They control conduct. They are stars
of destiny shining in the inner firmament. And if art would truly
hold the mirror up to nature, it must reflect these greater and
lesser lights that rule the day and the night.
How many of the plays that divert and misinform the modern theatregoer
turn on the pivot of a love-affair, not always pure, but
generally simple! And how many of those that are imported from
France proceed upon the theory that the Seventh is the only
Commandment, and that the principal attraction of life lies in the
opportunity of breaking it! The matinee-girl is not likely to have
a very luminous or truthful idea of existence floating around in her
pretty little head.
But, after all, the great plays, those that take the deepest hold
upon the heart, like HAMLET and KING LEAR, MACBETH and OTHELLO, are
not love-plays. And the most charming comedies, like THE WINTER'S
TALE, and THE RIVALS, and RIP VAN WINKLE, are chiefly memorable for
other things than love-scenes.
Even in novels, love shows at its best when it does not absorb the
whole plot. LORNA DOONE is a lovers' story, but there is a blessed
minimum of spooning in it, and always enough of working and fighting
to keep the air clear and fresh. THE HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN, and
HYPATIA, and ROMOLA, and THE CLOISTER AND THE HEARTH, and JOHN
INGLESANT, and THE THREE MUSKETEERS, and NOTRE DAME, and PEACE AND
WAR, and QUO VADIS,--these are great novels because they are much
more than tales of romantic love. As for HENRY ESMOND, (which seems
to me the best of all,) certainly "love at first sight" does not
play the finest role in that book.
There are good stories of our own day--pathetic, humourous,
entertaining, powerful--in which the element of romantic love is
altogether subordinate, or even imperceptible. THE RISE OF SILAS
LAPHAM does not owe its deep interest to the engagement of the very
charming young people who enliven it. MADAME DELPHINE and OLE
'STRACTED are perfect stories of their kind. I would not barter THE
JUNGLE BOOKS for a hundred of THE BRUSHWOOD BOY.
The truth is that love, considered merely as the preference of one
person for another of the opposite sex, is not "the greatest thing
in the world." It becomes great only when it leads on, as it often
does, to heroism and self-sacrifice and fidelity. Its chief value
for art (the interpreter) lies not in itself, but in its quickening
relation to the other elements of life. It must be seen and shown
in its due proportion, and in harmony with the broader landscape.
Do you believe that in all the world there is only one woman
specially created for each man, and that the order of the universe
will be hopelessly askew unless these two needles find each other in
the haystack? You believe it for yourself, perhaps; but do you
believe it for Tom Johnson? You remember what a terrific
disturbance he made in the summer of 189-, at Bar Harbor, about
Ellinor Brown, and how he ran away with her in September. You have
also seen them together (occasionally) at Lenox and Newport, since
their marriage. Are you honestly of the opinion that if Tom had not
married Ellinor, these two young lives would have been a total
wreck?
Adam Smith, in his book on THE MORAL SENTIMENTS, goes so far as to
say that "love is not interesting to the observer because it is AN
AFFECTION OF THE IMAGINATION, into which it is difficult for a third
party to enter." Something of the same kind occurred to me in
regard to Tom and Ellinor. Yet I would not have presumed to suggest
this thought to either of them. Nor would I have quoted in their
hearing the melancholy and frigid prediction of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
to the effect that they would some day discover "that all which at
first drew them together--those once sacred features, that magical
play of charm--was deciduous."
DECIDUOUS, indeed? Cold, unpleasant, botanical word! Rather would
I prognosticate for the lovers something perennial,
"A sober certainty of waking bliss,common about it. It was his habit to succeed, and all
the
rest of us were hardened to it.
When he married Cornelia Cochrane, we were consoled for our partial
loss by the apparent fitness and brilliancy of the match. If
Beekman was a masterful man, Cornelia was certainly what you might
call a mistressful woman. She had been the head of her house since
she was eighteen years old. She carried her good looks like the
family plate; and when she came into the breakfast-room and said
good-morning, it was with an air as if she presented every one with
a check for a thousand dollars. Her tastes were accepted as
judgments, and her preferences had the force of laws. Wherever she
wanted to go in the summer-time, there the finger of household
destiny pointed. At Newport, at Bar Harbour, at Lenox, at
Southampton, she made a record. When she was joined in holy wedlock
to Beekman De Peyster, her father and mother heaved a sigh of
satisfaction, and settled down for a quiet vacation in Cherry
Valley.
It was in the second summer after the wedding that Beekman admitted
to a few of his ancient Petrine cronies, in moments of confidence
(unjustifiable, but natural), that his wife had one fault.
"It is not exactly a fault," he said, "not a positive fault, you
know. It is just a kind of a defect, due to her education, of
course. In everything else she's magnificent. But she does n't
care for fishing. "
to survive the evanescence of love's young dream. Ellinor should
turn out to be a woman like the Lady Elizabeth Hastings, of whom
Richard Steele wrote that "to love her was a liberal education."
Tom should prove that he had in him the lasting stuff of a true man
and a hero. Then it would make little difference whether their
conjunction had been eternally prescribed in the book of fate or
not. It would be evidently a fit match, made on earth and
illustrative of heaven.
But even in the making of such a match as this, the various stages
of attraction, infatuation, and appropriation should not be
displayed too prominently before the world, nor treated as events of
overwhelming importance and enduring moment. I would not counsel
Tom and Ellinor, in the midsummer of their engagement, to have their
photographs taken together in affectionate attitudes.
The pictures of an imaginary kind which deal with the subject of
romantic love are, almost without exception, fatuous and futile.
The inanely amatory, with their languishing eyes, weary us. The
endlessly osculatory, with their protracted salutations, are
sickening. Even when an air of sentimental propriety is thrown
about them by some such title as "Wedded" or "The Honeymoon," they
fatigue us. For the most part, they remind me of the remark which
the Commodore made upon a certain painting of Jupiter and lo which
hangs in the writing-room of the Contrary Club.
"Sir," said that gently piercing critic, "that picture is equally
unsatisfactory to the artist, to the moralist, and to the
voluptuary."
Nevertheless, having made a clean breast of my misgivings and
reservations on the subject of lovers and landscape, I will now
confess that the whole of my doubts do not weigh much against my
unreasoned faith in romantic love. At heart I am no infidel, but a
most obstinate believer and devotee. My seasons of skepticism are
transient. They are connected with a torpid liver and aggravated by
confinement to a sedentary life and enforced abstinence from
angling. Out-of-doors, I return to a saner and happier frame of
mind.
As my wheel rolls along the Riverside Drive in the golden glow of
the sunset, I rejoice that the episode of Charles Henry and Matilda
Jane has not been omitted from the view. This vast and populous
city, with all its passing show of life, would be little better than
a waste, howling wilderness if we could not catch a glimpse, now and
then, of young people falling in love in the good old-fashioned way.
Even on a trout-stream, I have seen nothing prettier than the sight
upon which I once came suddenly as I was fishing down the Neversink.
A boy was kneeling beside the brook, and a girl was giving him a
drink of water out of her rosy hands. They stared with wonder and
compassion at the wet and solitary angler, wading down the stream,
as if he were some kind of a mild lunatic. But as I glanced
discreetly at their small tableau, I was not unconscious of the new
joy that came into the landscape with the presence of
"A lover and his lass."
I knew how sweet the water tasted from that kind of a cup. I also
have lived in Arcadia, and have not forgotten the way back.
A FATAL SUCCESS
"What surprises me in her behaviour," said he, "is its thoroughness.
Woman seldom does things by halves, but often by doubles."--SOLOMON
SINGLEWITZ: The Life of Adam.
Beekman De Peyster was probably the most passionate and triumphant
fisherman in the Petrine Club. He angled with the same dash and
confidence that he threw into his operations in the stock-market.
He was sure to be the first man to get his flies on the water at the
opening of the season. And when we came together for our fall
meeting, to compare notes of our wanderings on various streams and
make up the fish-stories for the year, Beekman was almost always
"high hook." We expected, as a matter of course, to hear that he
had taken the most and the largest fish.
It was so with everything that he undertook. He was a masterful
man. If there was an unusually large trout in a river, Beekman knew
about it before any one else, and got there first, and came home
with the fish. It did not make him unduly proud, because there was
nothing unShe says it 's stupid,--can't see why any one
should like the woods,--calls camping out the lunatic's diversion.
It 's rather awkward for a man with my habits to have his wife take
such a view. But it can be changed by training. I intend to
educate her and convert her. I shall make an angler of her yet."
And so he did.
The new education was begun in the Adirondacks, and the first lesson
was given at Paul Smith's. It was a complete failure.
Beekman persuaded her to come out with him for a day on Meacham
River, and promised to convince her of the charm of angling. She
wore a new gown, fawn-colour and violet, with a picture-hat, very
taking. But the Meacham River trout was shy that day; not even
Beekman could induce him to rise to the fly. What the trout lacked
in confidence the mosquitoes more than made up. Mrs. De Peyster
came home much sunburned, and expressed a highly unfavourable
opinion of fishing as an amusement and of Meacham River as a resort.
"The nice people don't come to the Adirondacks to fish," said she;
"they come to talk about the fishing twenty years ago. Besides,
what do you want to catch that trout for? If you do, the other men
will say you bought it, and the hotel will have to put in a new one
for the rest of the season."
The following year Beekman tried Moosehead Lake. Here he found an
atmosphere more favourable to his plan of education. There were a
good many people who really fished, and short expeditions in the
woods were quite fashionable. Cornelia had a camping-costume of the
most approved style made by Dewlap on Fifth Avenue,--pearl-gray with
linings of rose-silk,--and consented to go with her husband on a
trip up Moose River. They pitched their tent the first evening at
the mouth of Misery Stream, and a storm came on. The rain sifted
through the canvas in a fine spray, and Mrs. De Peyster sat up all
night in a waterproof cloak, holding an umbrella. The next day they
were back at the hotel in time for lunch.
"It was horrid," she told her most intimate friend, "perfectly
horrid. The idea of sleeping in a shower-bath, and eating your
breakfast from a tin plate, just for sake of catching a few silly
fish! Why not send your guides out to get them for you?"
But, in spite of this profession of obstinate heresy, Beekman
observed with secret joy that there were signs, before the end of
the season, that Cornelia was drifting a little, a very little but
still perceptibly, in the direction of a change of heart. She began
to take an interest, as the big trout came along in September, in
the reports of the catches made by the different anglers. She would
saunter out with the other people to the corner of the porch to see
the fish weighed and spread out on the grass. Several times she
went with Beekman in the canoe to Hardscrabble Point, and showed
distinct evidences of pleasure when he caught large trout. The last
day of the season, when he returned from a successful expedition to
Roach River and Lily Bay, she inquired with some particularity about
the results of his sport; and in the evening, as the company sat
before the great open fire in the hall of the hotel, she was heard
to use this information with considerable skill in putting down Mrs.
Minot Peabody of Boston, who was recounting the details of her
husband's catch at Spencer Pond. Cornelia was not a person to be
contented with the back seat, even in fish-stories.
When Beekman observed these indications he was much encouraged, and
resolved to push his educational experiment briskly forward to his
customary goal of success.
"Some things can be done, as well as others," he said in his
masterful way, as three of us were walking home together after the
autumnal dinner of the Petrine Club, which he always attended as a
graduate member. "A real fisherman never gives up. I told you I'd
make an angler out of my wife; and so I will. It has been rather
difficult. She is 'dour' in rising. But she's beginning to take
notice of the fly now. Give me another season, and I'll have her
landed."
Good old Beekman! Little did he think-- But I must not interrupt
the story with moral reflections.
The preparations that he made for his final effort at conversion
were thorough and prudent. He had a private interview with Dewlap
in regard to the construction of a practical fishing-costume for a
lady, which resulted in something more reasonable and workmanlike
than had ever been turned out by that famous artist. He ordered
from Hook and Catchett a lady's angling-outfit of the most enticing
description,--a split-bamboo rod, light as a girl's wish, and strong
as a matron's will; an oxidized silver reel, with a monogram on one
side, and a sapphire set in the handle for good luck; a book of
flies, of all sizes and colours, with the correct names inscribed in
gilt letters on each page. He surrounded his favourite sport with
an aureole of elegance and beauty. And then he took Cornelia in
September to the Upper Dam at Rangeley.
She went reluctant. She arrived disgusted. She stayed incredulous.
She returned-- Wait a bit, and you shall hear how she returned.
The Upper Dam at Rangeley is the place, of all others in the world,
where the lunacy of angling may be seen in its incurable stage.
There is a cosy little inn, called a camp, at the foot of a big
lake. In front of the inn is a huge dam of gray stone, over which
the river plunges into a great oval pool, where the trout assemble
in the early fall to perpetuate their race. From the tenth of
September to the thirtieth, there is not an hour of the day or night
when there are no boats floating on that pool, and no anglers
trailing the fly across its waters. Before the late fishermen are
ready to come in at midnight, the early fishermen may be seen
creeping down to the shore with lanterns in order to begin before
cock-crow. The number of fish taken is not large,--perhaps five or
six for the whole company on an average day,--but the size is
sometimes enormous,--nothing under three pounds is counted,--and
they pervade thought and conversation at the Upper Dam to the
exclusion of every other subject. There is no driving, no dancing,
no golf, no tennis. There is nothing to do but fish or die.
At first, Cornelia thought she would choose the latter alternative.
But a remark of that skilful and morose old angler, McTurk, which
she overheard on the verandah after supper, changed her mind.
"Women have no sporting instinct," said he. "They only fish because
they see men doing it. They are imitative animals."
That same night she told Beekman, in the subdued tone which the
architectural construction of the house imposes upon all
confidential communications in the bedrooms, but with resolution in
every accent, that she proposed to go fishing with him on the
morrow.
"But not on that pool, right in front of the house, you understand.
There must be some other place, out on the lake, where we can fish
for three or four days, until I get the trick of this wobbly rod.
Then I'll show that old bear, McTurk, what kind of an animal woman
is.
Beekman was simply delighted. Five days of diligent practice at the
mouth of Mill Brook brought his pupil to the point where he
pronounced her safe.
"Of course," he said patronizingly, "you have 'nt learned all about
it yet. That will take years. But you can get your fly out thirty
feet, and you can keep the tip of your rod up. If you do that, the
trout will hook himself, in rapid water, eight times out of ten.
For playing him, if you follow my directions, you 'll be all right.
We will try the pool tonight, and hope for a medium-sized fish."
Cornelia said nothing, but smiled and nodded. She had her own
thoughts.
At about nine o'clock Saturday night, they anchored their boat on
the edge of the shoal where the big eddy swings around, put out the
lantern and began to fish. Beekman sat in the bow of the boat, with
his rod over the left side; Cornelia in the stern, with her rod over
the right side. The night was cloudy and very black. Each of them
had put on the largest possible fly, one a "Bee-Pond" and the other
a "Dragon;" but even these were invisible. They measured out the
right length of line, and let the flies drift back until they hung
over the shoal, in the curly water where the two currents meet.
There were three other boats to the left of them. McTurk was their
only neighbour in the darkness on the right. Once they heard him
swearing softly to himself, and knew that he had hooked and lost a
fish.
Away down at the tail of the pool, dimly visible through the gloom,
the furtive fisherman, Parsons, had anchored his boat. No noise
ever came from that craft. If he wished to change his position, he
did not pull up the anchor and let it down again with a bump. He
simply lengthened or shortened his anchor rope. There was no click
of the reel when he played a fish. He drew in and paid out the line
through the rings by hand, without a sound. What he thought when a
fish got away, no one knew, for he never said it. He concealed his
angling as if it had been a conspiracy. Twice that night they heard
a faint splash in the water near his boat, and twice they saw him
put his arm over the side in the darkness and bring it back again
very quietly.
"That 's the second fish for Parsons," whispered Beekman, "what a
secretive old Fortunatus he is! He knows more about fishing than
any man on the pool, and talks less."
Cornelia did not answer. Her thoughts were all on the tip of her
own rod. About eleven o'clock a fine, drizzling rain set in. The
fishing was very slack. All the other boats gave it up in despair;
but Cornelia said she wanted to stay out a little longer, they might
as well finish up the week.
At precisely fifty minutes past eleven, Beekman reeled up his line,
and remarked with firmness that the holy Sabbath day was almost at
hand and they ought to go in.
"Not till I 've landed this trout," said Cornelia.
"What? A trout! Have you got one?"
"Certainly; I 've had him on for at least fifteen minutes. I 'm
playing him Mr. Parsons' way. You might as well light the lantern
and get the net ready; he 's coming in towards the boat now."
Beekman broke three matches before he made the lantern burn; and
when he held it up over the gunwale, there was the trout sure
enough, gleaming ghostly pale in the dark water, close to the boat,
and quite tired out. He slipped the net over the fish and drew it
in,--a monster.
"I 'll carry that trout, if you please," said Cornelia, as they
stepped out of the boat; and she walked into the camp, on the last
stroke of midnight, with the fish in her hand, and quietly asked for
the steelyard.
Eight pounds and fourteen ounces,--that was the weight. Everybody
was amazed. It was the "best fish" of the year. Cornelia showed no
sign of exultation, until just as John was carrying the trout to the
ice-house. Then she flashed out:--"Quite a fair imitation, Mr.
McTurk,--is n't it?"
Now McTurk's best record for the last fifteen years was seven pounds
and twelve ounces.
So far as McTurk is concerned, this is the end of the story. But
not for the De Peysters. I wish it were. Beekman went to sleep
that night with a contented spirit. He felt that his experiment in
education had been a success. He had made his wife an angler.
He had indeed, and to an extent which he little suspected. That
Upper Dam trout was to her like the first taste of blood to the
tiger. It seemed to change, at once, not so much her character as
the direction of her vital energy. She yielded to the lunacy of
angling, not by slow degrees, (as first a transient delusion, then a
fixed idea, then a chronic infirmity, finally a mild insanity,) but
by a sudden plunge into the most violent mania. So far from being
ready to die at Upper Dam, her desire now was to live there--and to
live solely for the sake of fishing--as long as the season was open.
There were two hundred and forty hours left to midnight on the
thirtieth of September. At least two hundred of these she spent on
the pool; and when Beekman was too exhausted to manage the boat and
the net and the lantern for her, she engaged a trustworthy guide to
take Beekman's place while he slept. At the end of the last day her
score was twenty-three, with an average of five pounds and a
quarter. His score was nine, with an average of four pounds. He
had succeeded far beyond his wildest hopes.
The next year his success became even more astonishing. They went
to the Titan Club in Canada. The ugliest and most inaccessible
sheet of water in that territory is Lake Pharaoh. But it is famous
for the extraordinary fishing at a certain spot near the outlet,
where there is just room enough for one canoe. They camped on Lake
Pharaoh for six weeks, by Mrs. De Peyster's command; and her canoe
was always the first to reach the fishing-ground in the morning, and
the last to leave it in the evening.
Some one asked him, when he returned to the city, whether he had
good luck.
"Quite fair," he tossed off in a careless way; "we took over three
hundred pounds."
"To your own rod?" asked the inquirer, in admiration.
"No-o-o," said Beekman, "there were two of us."
There were two of them, also, the following year, when they joined
the Natasheebo Salmon Club and fished that celebrated river in
Labrador. The custom of drawing lots every night for the water that
each member was to angle over the next day, seemed to be especially
designed to fit the situation. Mrs. De Peyster could fish her own
pool and her husband's too. The result of that year's fishing was
something phenomenal. She had a score that made a paragraph in the
newspapers and called out editorial comment. One editor was so
inadequate to the situation as to entitle the article in which he
described her triumph "The Equivalence of Woman." It was wellmeant,
but she was not at all pleased with it.
She was now not merely an angler, but a "record" angler of the most
virulent type. Wherever they went, she wanted, and she got, the
pick of the water. She seemed to be equally at home on all kinds of
streams, large and small. She would pursue the little mountainbrook
trout in the early spring, and the Labrador salmon in July,
and the huge speckled trout of the northern lakes in September, with
the same avidity and resolution. All that she cared for was to get
the best and the most of the fishing at each place where she angled.
This she always did.
And Beekman,--well, for him there were no more long separations from
the partner of his life while he went off to fish some favourite
stream. There were no more home-comings after a good day's sport to
find her clad in cool and dainty raiment on the verandah, ready to
welcome him with friendly badinage. There was not even any casting
of the fly around Hardscrabble Point while she sat in the canoe
reading a novel, looking up with mild and pleasant interest when he
caught a larger fish than usual, as an older and wiser person looks
at a child playing some innocent game. Those days of a divided
interest between man and wife were gone. She was now fully
converted, and more. Beekman and Cornelia were one; and she was the
one.
The last time I saw the De Peysters he was following her along the
Beaverkill, carrying a landing-net and a basket, but no rod. She
paused for a moment to exchange greetings, and then strode on down
the stream. He lingered for a few minutes longer to light a pipe.
"Well, old man," I said, "you certainly have succeeded in making an
angler of Mrs. De Peyster."
"Yes, indeed," he answered,--"have n't I?" Then he continued, after
a few thoughtful puffs of smoke, "Do you know, I 'm not quite so
sure as I used to be that fishing is the best of all sports. I
sometimes think of giving it up and going in for croquet."
FISHING IN BOOKS
"SIMPSON.--Have you ever seen any American books on angling, Fisher?"
"FISHER.--No, I do not think there are any published. Brother
Jonathan is not yet sufficiently civilized to produce anything
original on the gentle art. There is good trout-fishing in America,
and the streams, which are all free, are much less fished than in
our Island, 'from the small number of gentlemen,' as an American
writer says, 'who are at leisure to give their time to it.'"
--WILLIAM ANDREW CHATTO: The Angler's Souvenir (London, 1835).
That wise man and accomplished scholar, Sir Henry Wotton, the friend
of Izaak Walton and ambassador of King James I to the republic of
Venice, was accustomed to say that "he would rather live five May
months than forty Decembers." The reason for this preference was no
secret to those who knew him. It had nothing to do with British or
Venetian politics. It was simply because December, with all its
domestic joys, is practically a dead month in the angler's calendar.
His occupation is gone. The better sort of fish are out of season.
The trout are lean and haggard: it is no trick to catch them and no
treat to eat them. The salmon, all except the silly kelts, have run
out to sea, and the place of their habitation no man kno his goings, that only three
other writers, so far as I know, have ever spoken ill of him.
weth. There
is nothing for the angler to do but wait for the return of spring,
and meanwhile encourage and sustain his patience with such small
consolations in kind as a friendly Providence may put within his
reach.
Some solace may be found, on a day of crisp, wintry weather, in the
childish diversion of catching pickerel through the ice. This
method of taking fish is practised on a large scale and with
elaborate machinery by men who supply the market. I speak not of
their commercial enterprise and its gross equipage, but of icefishing
in its more sportive and desultory form, as it is pursued by
country boys and the incorrigible village idler.
You choose for this pastime a pond where the ice is not too thick,
lest the labour of cutting through should be discouraging; nor too
thin, lest the chance of breaking in should be embarrassing. You
then chop out, with almost any kind of a hatchet or pick, a number
of holes in the ice, making each one six or eight inches in
diameter, and placing them about five or six feet apart. If you
happen to know the course of a current flowing through the pond, or
the location of a shoal frequented by minnows, you will do well to
keep near it. Over each hole you set a small contrivance called a
"tilt-up." It consists of two sticks fastened in the middle, at
right angles to each other. The stronger of the two is laid across
the opening in the ice. The other is thus balanced above the
aperture, with a baited hook and line attached to one end, while the
other end is adorned with a little flag. For choice, I would have
the flags red. They look gayer, and I imagine they are more lucky.
When you have thus baited and set your tilt-ups,--twenty or thirty
of them,--you may put on your skates and amuse yourself by gliding
to and fro on the smooth surface of the ice, cutting figures of
eight and grapevines and diamond twists, while you wait for the
pickerel to begin their part of the performance. They will let you
know when they are ready.
A fish, swimming around in the dim depths under the ice, sees one of
your baits, fancies it, and takes it in. The moment he tries to run
away with it he tilts the little red flag into the air and waves it
backward and forward. "Be quick!" he signals all unconsciously;
"here I am; come and pull me up!"
When two or three flags are fluttering at the same moment, far apart
on the pond, you must skate with speed and haul in your lines
promptly.
How hard it is, sometimes, to decide which one you will take first!
That flag in the middle of the pond has been waving for at least a
minute; but the other, in the corner of the bay, is tilting up and
down more violently: it must be a larger fish. Great Dagon! There's
another red signal flying, away over by the point! You hesitate,
you make a few strokes in one direction, then you whirl around and
dart the other way. Meantime one of the tilt-ups, constructed with
too short a cross-stick, has been pulled to one side, and disappears
in the hole. One pickerel in the pond carries a flag. Another
tilt-up ceases to move and falls flat upon the ice. The bait has
been stolen. You dash desperately toward the third flag and pull in
the only fish that is left,--probably the smallest of them all!
A surplus of opportunities does not insure the best luck.
A room with seven doors--like the famous apartment in Washington's
headquarters at Newburgh--is an invitation to bewilderment. I would
rather see one fair opening in life than be confused by three
dazzling chances.
There was a good story about fishing through the ice which formed
part of the stock-in-conversation of that ingenious woodsman, Martin
Moody, Esquire, of Big Tupper Lake. "'T was a blame cold day," he
said, "and the lines friz up stiffer 'n a fence-wire, jus' as fast
as I pulled 'em in, and my fingers got so dum' frosted I could n't
bait the hooks. But the fish was thicker and hungrier 'n flies in
June. So I jus' took a piece of bait and held it over one o' the
holes. Every time a fish jumped up to git it, I 'd kick him out on
the ice. I tell ye, sir, I kicked out more 'n four hundred pounds
of pick'rel that morning. Yaas, 't was a big lot, I 'low, but then
't was a cold day! I jus' stacked 'em up solid, like cordwood."
Let us now leave this frigid subject! Iced fishing is but a
chilling and unsatisfactory imitation of real sport. The angler
will soon turn from it with satiety, and seek a better consolation
for the winter of his discontent in the entertainment of fishing in
books.
Angling is the only sport that boasts the honour of having given a
classic to literature.
Izaak Walton's success with THE COMPLEAT ANGLER was a fine
illustration of fisherman's luck. He set out, with some aid from an
adept in fly-fishing and cookery, named Thomas Barker, to produce a
little "discourse of fish and fishing" which should serve as a
useful manual for quiet persons inclined to follow the contemplative
man's recreation. He came home with a book which has made his name
beloved by ten generations of gentle readers, and given him a secure
place in the Pantheon of letters,--not a haughty eminence, but a
modest niche, all his own, and ever adorned with grateful offerings
of fresh flowers.
This was great luck. But it was well-deserved, and therefore it has
not been grudged or envied.
Walton was a man so peaceful and contented, so friendly in his
disposition, and so innocent in allOne was that sour-complexioned Cromwellian trooper,
Richard Franck,
who wrote in 1658 an envious book entitled NORTHERN MEMOIRS,
CALCULATED FOR THE MERIDIAN OF SCOTLAND, ETC., TO WHICH IS ADDED
THE
CONTEMPLATIVE AND PRACTICAL ANGLER. In this book the furious Franck
first pays Walton the flattery of imitation, and then further adorns
him with abuse, calling THE COMPLEAT ANGLER "an indigested octavo,
stuffed with morals from Dubravius and others," and more than
hinting that the father of anglers knew little or nothing of "his
uncultivated art." Walton was a Churchman and a Loyalist, you see,
while Franck was a Commonwealth man and an Independent.
The second detractor of Walton was Lord Byron, who wrote
"The quaint, old, cruel coxcomb in his gullet
Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it."
But Byron is certainly a poor authority on the quality of mercy.
His contempt need not cause an honest man overwhelming distress. I
should call it a complimentary dislike.
The third author who expressed unpleasant sentiments in regard to
Walton was Leigh Hunt. Here, again, I fancy that partizan prejudice
had something to do with the dislike. Hunt was a radical in
politics and religion. Moreover there was a feline strain in his
character, which made it necessary for him to scratch somebody now
and then, as a relief to his feelings.
Walton was a great quoter. His book is not "stuffed," as Franck
jealously alleged, but it is certainly well sauced with piquant
references to other writers, as early as the author of the Book of
Job, and as late as John Dennys, who betrayed to the world THE
SECRETS OF ANGLING in 1613. Walton further seasoned his book with
fragments of information about fish and fishing, more or less
apocryphal, gathered from Aelian, Pliny, Plutarch, Sir Francis
Bacon, Dubravius, Gesner, Rondeletius, the learned Aldrovandus, the
venerable Bede, the divine Du Bartas, and many others. He borrowed
freely for the adornment of his discourse, and did not scorn to make
use of what may he called LIVE QUOTATIONS,--that is to say, the
unpublished remarks of his near contemporaries, caught in friendly
conversation, or handed down by oral tradition.
But these various seasonings did not disguise, they only enhanced,
the delicate flavour of the dish which he served up to his readers.
This was all of his own taking, and of a sweetness quite
incomparable.
I like a writer who is original enough to water his garden with
quotations, without fear of being drowned out. Such men are Charles
Lamb and James Russell Lowell and John Burroughs.
Walton's book is as fresh as a handful of wild violets and sweet
lavender. It breathes the odours of the green fields and the woods.
It tastes of simple, homely, appetizing things like the "syllabub of
new verjuice in a new-made haycock" which the milkwoman promised to
give Piscator the next time he came that way. Its music plays the
tune of A CONTENTED HEART over and over again without dulness, and
charms us into harmony with
"A noise like the sound of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune."
Walton has been quoted even more than any of the writers whom he
quotes. It would be difficult, even if it were not ungrateful, to
write about angling without referring to him. Some pretty saying,
some wise reflection from his pages, suggests itself at almost every
turn of the subject.
And yet his book, though it be the best, is not the only readable
one that his favourite recreation has begotten. The literature of
angling is extensive, as any one may see who will look at the list
of the collection presented by Mr. John Bartlett to Harvard
University, or study the catalogue of the piscatorial library of Mr.
Dean Sage, of Albany, who himself has contributed an admirable book
on THE RISTIGOUCHE.
Nor is this literature altogether composed of dry and technical
treatises, interesting only to the confirmed anglimaniac, or to the
young novice ardent in pursuit of practical information. There is a
good deal of juicy reading in it.
Books about angling should be divided (according to De Quincey's
method) into two classes,--the literature of knowledge, and the
literature of power.
The first class contains the handbooks on rods and tackle, the
directions how to angle for different kinds of fish, and the guides
to various fishing-resorts. The weakness of these books is that
they soon fall out of date, as the manufacture of tackle is
improved, the art of angling refined, and the fish in once-famous
waters are educated or exterminated.
Alas, how transient is the fashion of this world, even in angling!
The old manuals with their precise instruction for trimming and
painting trout-rods eighteen feet long, and their painful
description of "oyntments" made of nettle-juice, fish-hawk oil,
camphor, cat's fat, or assafoedita, (supposed to allure the fish,)
are altogether behind the age. Many of the flies described by
Charles Cotton and Thomas Barker seem to have gone out of style
among the trout. Perhaps familiarity has bred contempt. Generation
after generation of fish have seen these same old feathered
confections floating on the water, and learned by sharp experience
that they do not taste good. The blase trout demand something new,
something modern. It is for this reason, I suppose, that an
altogether original fly, unheard of, startling, will often do great
execution in an over-fished pool.
Certain it is that the art of angling, in settled regions, is
growing more dainty and difficult. You must cast a longer, lighter
line; you must use finer leaders; you must have your flies dressed
on smaller hooks.
And another thing is certain: in many places (described in the
ancient volumes) where fish were once abundant, they are now like
the shipwrecked sailors in Vergil his Aeneid,--
"rari nantes in gurgite vasto."
The floods themselves are also disappearing. Mr. Edmund Clarence
Stedman was telling me, the other day, of the trout-brook that used
to run through the Connecticut village when he nourished a poet's
youth. He went back to visit the stream a few years since, and it
was gone, literally vanished from the face of earth, stolen to make
a watersupply for the town, and used for such base purposes as the
washing of clothes and the sprinkling of streets.
I remember an expedition with my father, some twenty years ago, to
Nova Scotia, whither we set out to realize the hopes kindled by an
ANGLER'S GUIDE written in the early sixties. It was like looking
for tall clocks in the farmhouses around Boston. The harvest had
been well gleaned before our arrival, and in the very place where
our visionary author located his most famous catch we found a summer
hotel and a sawmill.
'T is strange and sad, how many regions there are where "the fishing
was wonderful forty years ago"!
The second class of angling books--the literature of power--includes
all (even those written with some purpose of instruction) in which
the gentle fascinations of the sport, the attractions of living outof-
doors, the beauties of stream and woodland, the recollections of
happy adventure, and the cheerful thoughts that make the best of a
day's luck, come clearly before the author's mind and find some fit
expression in his words. Of such books, thank Heaven, there is a
plenty to bring a Maytide charm and cheer into the fisherman's dull
December. I will name, by way of random tribute from a grateful but
unmethodical memory, a few of these consolatory volumes.
First of all comes a family of books that were born in Scotland and
smell of the heather.
Whatever a Scotchman's conscience permits him to do, is likely to be
done with vigour and a fiery mind. In trade and in theology, in
fishing and in fighting, he is all there and thoroughly kindled.
There is an old-fashioned book called THE MOOR AND THE LOCH, by John
Colquhoun, which is full of contagious enthusiasm. Thomas Tod
Stoddart was a most impassioned angler, (though over-given to strong
language,) and in his ANGLING REMINISCENCES he has touched the
subject with a happy hand,--happiest when he breaks into poetry and
tosses out a song for the fisherman. Professor John Wilson of the
University of Edinburgh held the chair of Moral Philosophy in that
institution, but his true fame rests on his well-earned titles of A.
M. and F. R. S.,--Master of Angling, and Fisherman Royal of
Scotland. His RECREATIONS OF CHRISTOPHER NORTH, albeit their humour
is sometimes too boisterously hammered in, are genial and generous
essays, overflowing with passages of good-fellowship and pedestrian
fancy. I would recommend any person in a dry and melancholy state
of mind to read his paper on "Streams," in the first volume of
ESSAYS CRITICAL AND IMAGINATIVE. But it must be said, by way of
warning to those with whom dryness is a matter of principle, that
all Scotch fishing-books are likely to be sprinkled with Highland
Dew.
Among English anglers, Sir Humphry Davy is one of whom Christopher
North speaks rather slightingly. Nevertheless his SALMONIA is well
worth reading, not only because it was written by a learned man, but
because it exhales the spirit of cheerful piety and vital wisdom.
Charles Kingsley was another great man who wrote well about angling.
His CHALK-STREAM STUDIES are clear and sparkling. They cleanse the
mind and refresh the heart and put us more in love with living. Of
quite a different style are the MAXIMS AND HINTS FOR AN ANGLER, AND
MISERIES OF FISHING, which were written by Richard Penn, a grandson
of the founder of Pennsylvania. This is a curious and rare little
volume, professing to be a compilation from the "Common Place Book
of the Houghton Fishing Club," and dealing with the subject from a
Pickwickian point of view. I suppose that William Penn would have
thought his grandson a frivolous writer.
But he could not have entertained such an opinion of the Honourable
Robert Boyle, of whose OCCASIONAL REFLECTIONS no less than twelve
discourses treat "of Angling Improved to Spiritual Uses." The
titles of some of these discourses are quaint enough to quote.
"Upon the being called upon to rise early on a very fair morning."
"Upon the mounting, singing, and lighting of larks." "Upon fishing
with a counterfeit fly." "Upon a danger arising from an
unseasonable contest with the steersman." "Upon one's drinking
water out of the brim of his hat." With such good texts it is easy
to endure, and easier still to spare, the sermons.
Englishmen carry their love of travel into their anglimania, and
many of their books describe fishing adventures in foreign parts.
RAMBLES WITH A FISHING-ROD, by E. S. Roscoe, tells of happy days in
the Salzkammergut and the Bavarian Highlands and Normandy. FISHTAILS
AND A FEW OTHERS, by Bradnock Hall, contains some delightful
chapters on Norway. THE ROD IN INDIA, by H. S. Thomas, narrates
wonderful adventures with the Mahseer and the Rohu and other pagan
fish.
But, after all, I like the English angler best when he travels at
home, and writes of dry-fly fishing in the Itchen or the Test, or of
wet-fly fishing in Northumberland or Sutherlandshire. There is a
fascinating booklet that appeared quietly, some years ago, called AN
AMATEUR ANGLER'S DAYS IN DOVE DALE. It runs as easily and merrily
and kindly as a little river, full of peace and pure enjoyment.
Other books of the same quality have since been written by the same
pen,--DAYS IN CLOVER, FRESH WOODS, BY MEADOW AND STREAM. It is no
secret, I believe, that the author is Mr. Edward Marston, the senior
member of a London publishing-house. But he still clings to his
retiring pen-name of "The Amateur Angler," and represents himself,
by a graceful fiction, as all unskilled in the art. An instance of
similar modesty is found in Mr. Andrew Lang, who entitles the first
chapter of his delightful ANGLING SKETCHES (without which no
fisherman's library is complete), "Confessions of a Duffer." This
an engaging liberty which no one else would dare to take.
The best English fish-story pure and simple, that I know, is
"Crocker's Hole," by H. D. Black-more, the creator of LORNA DOONE.
Let us turn now to American books about angling. Of these the
merciful dispensations of Providence have brought forth no small
store since Mr. William Andrew Chatto made the ill-natured remark
which is pilloried at the head of this chapter. By the way, it
seems that Mr. Chatto had never heard of "The Schuylkill Fishing
Company," which was founded on that romantic stream near
Philadelphia in 1732, nor seen the AUTHENTIC HISTORICAL MEMOIR of
that celebrated and amusing society.
I am sorry for the man who cannot find pleasure in reading the
appendix of THE AMERICAN ANGLER'S BOOK, by Thaddeus Norris; or the
discursive pages of Frank Forester's FISH AND FISHING; or the
introduction and notes of that unexcelled edition of Walton which
was made by the Reverend Doctor George W. Bethune; or SUPERIOR
FISHING and GAME FISH OF THE NORTH, by Mr. Robert B. Roosevelt; or
Henshall's BOOK OF THE BLACK BASS; or the admirable disgressions of
Mr. Henry P. Wells, in his FLY-RODS AND FLY-TACKLE, and THE AMERICAN
SALMON ANGLER. Dr. William C. Prime has never put his profound
knowledge of the art of angling into a manual of technical
instruction; but he has written of the delights of the sport in OWL
CREEK LETTERS, and in I GO A-FISHING, and in some of the chapters of
ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS and AMONG NEW ENGLAND HILLS, with a
persuasive skill that has created many new anglers, and made many
old ones grateful. It is a fitting coincidence of heredity that his
niece, Mrs. Annie Trumbull Slosson, is the author of the most tender
and pathetic of all angling stories, FISHIN' JIMMY.
But it is not only in books written altogether from his peculiar
point of view and to humour his harmless insanity, that the angler
may find pleasant reading about his favourite pastime. There are
excellent bits of fishing scattered all through the field of good
literature. It seems as if almost all the men who could write well
had a friendly feeling for the contemplative sport.
Plutarch, in THE LIVES OF THE NOBLE GRECIANS AND ROMANS, tells a
capital fish-story of the manner in which the Egyptian Cleopatra
fooled that far-famed Roman wight, Marc Antony, when they were
angling together on the Nile. As I recall it, from a perusal in
early boyhood, Antony was having very bad luck indeed; in fact he
had taken nothing, and was sadly put out about it. Cleopatra,
thinking to get a rise out of him, secretly told one of her
attendants to dive over the opposite side of the barge and fasten a
salt fish to the Roman general's hook. The attendant was much
pleased with this commission, and, having executed it, proceeded to
add a fine stroke of his own; for when he had made the fish fast on
the hook, he gave a great pull to the line and held on tightly.
Antony was much excited and began to haul violently at his tackle.
"By Jupiter!" he exclaimed, "it was long in coming, but I have a
colossal bite now."
"Have a care," said Cleopatra, laughing behind her sunshade, "or he
will drag you into the water. You must give him line when he pulls
hard."
"Not a denarius will I give!" rudely responded Antony. "I mean to
have this halibut or Hades!"
At this moment the man under the boat, being out of breath, let the
line go, and Antony, falling backward, drew up the salted herring.
"Take that fish off the hook, Palinurus," he proudly said. "It is
not as large as I thought, but it looks like the oldest one that has
been caught to-day."
Such, in effect, is the tale narrated by the veracious Plutarch.
And if any careful critic wishes to verify my quotation from memory,
he may compare it with the proper page of Langhorne's translation; I
think it is in the second volume, near the end.
Sir Walter Scott, who once described himself as
"No fisher,
But a well-wisher
To the game,"
has an amusing passage of angling in the third chapter of
REDGAUNTLET. Darsie Latimer is relating his adventures in
Dumfriesshire. "By the way," says he, "old Cotton's instructions,
by which I hoped to qualify myself for the gentle society of
anglers, are not worth a farthing for this meridian. I learned this
by mere accident, after I had waited four mortal hours. I shall
never forget an impudent urchin, a cowherd, about twelve years old,
without either brogue or bonnet, barelegged, with a very indifferent
pair of breeches,--how the villain grinned in scorn at my landingnet,
my plummet, and the gorgeous jury of flies which I had
assembled to destroy all the fish in the river. I was induced at
last to lend the rod to the sneering scoundrel, to see what he would
make of it; and he not only half-filled my basket in an hour, but
literally taught me to kill two trouts with my own hand."
Thus ancient and well-authenticated is the superstition of the
angling powers of the barefooted country-boy,--in fiction.
Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, in that valuable but over-capitalized
book, MY NOVEL, makes use of Fishing for Allegorical Purposes. The
episode of John Burley and the One-eyed Perch not only points a
Moral but adorns the Tale.
In the works of R. D. Blackmore, angling plays a less instructive
but a pleasanter part. It is closely interwoven with love. There
is a magical description of trout-fishing on a meadow-brook in ALICE
LORRAINE. And who that has read LORNA DOONE, (pity for the man or
woman that knows not the delight of that book!) can ever forget how
young John Ridd dared his way up the gliddery water-slide, after
loaches, and found Lorna in a fair green meadow adorned with
flowers, at the top of the brook?
I made a little journey into the Doone Country once, just to see
that brook and to fish in it. The stream looked smaller, and the
water-slide less terrible, than they seemed in the book. But it was
a mighty pretty place after all; and I suppose that even John Ridd,
when he came back to it in after years, found it shrunken a little.
All the streams were larger in our boyhood than they are now,
except, perhaps, that which flows from the sweetest spring of all,
the fountain of love, which John Ridd discovered beside the
Bagworthy River,--and I, on the willow-shaded banks of the Patapsco,
where the Baltimore girls fish for gudgeons,--and you? Come, gentle
reader, is there no stream whose name is musical to you, because of
a hidden spring of love that you once found on its shore? The
waters of that fountain never fail, and in them alone we taste the
undiminished fulness of immortal youth.
The stories of William Black are enlivened with fish, and he knew,
better than most men, how they should be taken. Whenever he wanted
to get two young people engaged to each other, all other devices
failing, he sent them out to angle together. If it had not been for
fishing, everything in A PRINCESS OF THULE and WHITE HEATHER would
have gone wrong.
But even men who have been disappointed in love may angle for solace
or diversion. I have known some old bachelors who fished
excellently well; and others I have known who could find, and give,
much pleasure in a day on the stream, though they had no skill in
the sport. Of this class was Washington Irving, with an extract
from whose SKETCH BOOK I will bring this rambling dissertation to an
end.
"Our first essay," says he, was along a mountain brook among the
highlands of the Hudson; a most unfortunate place for the execution
of those piscatory tactics which had been invented along the velvet
margins of quiet English rivulets. It was one of those wild streams
that lavish, among our romantic solitudes, unheeded beauties enough
to fill the sketch-book of a hunter of the picturesque. Sometimes
it would leap down rocky shelves, making small cascades, over which
the trees threw their broad balancing sprays, and long nameless
weeds hung in fringes from the impending banks, dripping with
diamond drops. Sometimes it would brawl and fret along a ravine in
the matted shade of a forest, filling it with murmurs; and, after
this termagant career, would steal forth into open day, with the
most placid, demure face imaginable; as I have seen some pestilent
shrew of a housewife, after filling her home with uproar and illhumour,
come dimpling out of doors, swimming and courtesying, and
smiling upon all the world.
"How smoothly would this vagrant brook glide, at such times, through
some bosom of green meadow-land among the mountains, where the quiet
was only interrupted by the occasional tinkling of a bell from the
lazy cattle among the clover, or the sound of a woodcutter's axe
from the neighbouring forest!
"For my part, I was always a bungler at all kinds of sport that
required either patience or adroitness, and had not angled above
half an hour before I had completely 'satisfied the sentiment,' and
convinced myself of the truth of Izaak Walton's opinion, that
angling is something like poetry,--a man must be born to it. I
hooked myself instead of the fish; tangled my line in every tree;
lost my bait; broke my rod; until I gave up the attempt in despair,
and passed the day under the trees, reading old Izaak, satisfied
that it was his fascinating vein of honest simplicity and rural
feeling that had bewitched me, and not the passion for angling."
A NORWEGIAN HONEYMOON
"The best rose-bush, after all, is not that which has the fewest
thorns, but that which bears the finest roses."--SOLOMON SINGLEWITZ:
The Life of Adam.
I
It was not all unadulterated sweetness, of course. There were
enough difficulties in the way to make it seem desirable; and a few
stings of annoyance, now and then, lent piquancy to the adventure.
But a good memory, in dealing with the past, has the art of
straining out all the beeswax of discomfort, and storing up little
jars of pure hydromel. As we look back at our six weeks in Norway,
we agree that no period of our partnership in experimental
honeymooning has yielded more honey to the same amount of comb.
Several considerations led us to the resolve of taking our honeymoon
experimentally rather than chronologically. We started from the
self-evident proposition that it ought to be the happiest time in
married life.
"It is perfectly ridiculous," said my lady Graygown, "to suppose
that a thing like that can be fixed by the calendar. It may
possibly fall in the first month after the wedding, but it is not
likely. Just think how slightly two people know each other when
they get married. They are in love, of course, but that is not at
all the same as being well acquainted. Sometimes the more love, the
less acquaintance! And sometimes the more acquaintance, the less
love! Besides, at first there are always the notes of thanks for
the wedding-presents to be written, and the letters of
congratulation to be answered, and it is awfully hard to make each
one sound a little different from the others and perfectly natural.
Then, you know, everybody seems to suspect you of the folly of being
newly married. You run across your friends everywhere, and they
grin when they see you. You can't help feeling as if a lot of
people were watching you through opera-glasses, or taking snap-shots
at you with a kodak. It is absurd to imagine that the first month
must be the real honeymoon. And just suppose it were,--what bad
luck that would be! What would there be to look forward to?"
Every word that fell from her lips seemed to me like the wisdom of
Diotima.
"You are right," I cried; "Portia could not hold a candle to you for
clear argument. Besides, suppose two people are imprudent enough to
get married in the first week of December, as we did!--what becomes
of the chronological honeymoon then? There is no fishing in
December, and all the rivers of Paradise, at least in our latitude,
are frozen up. No, my lady, we will discover our month of honey by
the empirical method. Each year we will set out together to seek it
in a solitude for two; and we will compare notes on moons, and
strike the final balance when we are sure that our happiest
experiment has been completed."
We are not sure of that, even yet. We are still engaged, as a
committee of two, in our philosophical investigation, and we decline
to make anything but a report of progress. We know more now than we
did when we first went honeymooning in the city of Washington. For
one thing, we are certain that not even the far-famed rosemaryfields
of Narbonne, or the fragrant hillsides of the Corbieres,
yield a sweeter harvest to the busy-ness of the bees than the
Norwegian meadows and mountain-slopes yielded to our idleness in the
summer of 1888.
II
The rural landscape of Norway, on the long easterly slope that leads
up to the watershed among the mountains of the western coast, is not
unlike that of Vermont or New Hampshire. The railway from
Christiania to the Randsfjord carried us through a hilly country of
scattered farms and villages. Wood played a prominent part in the
scenery. There were dark stretches of forest on the hilltops and in
the valleys; rivers filled with floating logs; sawmills beside the
waterfalls; wooden farmhouses painted white; and rail-fences around
the fields. The people seemed sturdy, prosperous, independent.
They had the familiar habit of coming down to the station to see the
train arrive and depart. We might have fancied ourselves on a
journey through the Connecticut valley, if it had not been for the
soft sing-song of the Norwegian speech and the uniform politeness of
the railway officials.
What a room that was in the inn at Randsfjord where we spent our
first night out! Vast, bare, primitive, with eight windows to admit
the persistent nocturnal twilight; a sea-like floor of blue-painted
boards, unbroken by a single island of carpet; and a castellated
stove in one corner: an apartment for giants, with two little beds
for dwarfs on opposite shores of the ocean. There was no telephone;
so we arranged a system of communication with a fishing-line, to
make sure that the sleepy partner should be awake in time for the
early boat in the morning.
The journey up the lake took seven hours, and reminded us of a
voyage on Lake George; placid, picturesque, and pervaded by summer
boarders. Somewhere on the way we had lunch, and were well
fortified to take the road when the steamboat landed us at Odnaes,
at the head of the lake, about two o'clock in the afternoon.
There are several methods in which you may drive through Norway.
The government maintains posting-stations at the farms along the
main travelled highways, where you can hire horses and carriages of
various kinds. There are also English tourist agencies which make a
business of providing travellers with complete transportation. You
may try either of these methods alone, or you may make a judicious
mixture.
Thus, by an application of the theory of permutations and
combinations, you have your choice among four ways of accomplishing
a driving-tour. First, you may engage a carriage and pair, with a
driver, from one of the tourist agencies, and roll through your
journey in sedentary case, provided your horses do not go lame or
give out. Second, you may rely altogether upon the posting-stations
to send you on your journey; and this is a very pleasant, lively
way, provided there is not a crowd of travellers on the road before
you, who take up all the comfortable conveyances and leave you
nothing but a jolting cart or a ramshackle KARIOL of the time of St.
Olaf. Third, you may rent an easy-riding vehicle (by choice a wellhung
gig) for the entire trip, and change ponies at the stations as
you drive along; this is the safest way. The fourth method is to
hire your horseflesh at the beginning for the whole journey, and
pick up your vehicles from place to place. This method is
theoretically possible, but I do not know any one who has tried it.
Our gig was waiting for us at Odnaes. There was a brisk little
mouse-coloured pony in the shafts; and it took but a moment to strap
our leather portmanteau on the board at the back, perch the postboy
on top of it, and set out for our first experience of a Norwegian
driving-tour.
The road at first was level and easy; and we bowled along smoothly
through the valley of the Etnaelv, among drooping birch-trees and
green fields where the larks were singing. At Tomlevolden, ten
miles farther on, we reached the first station, a comfortable old
farmhouse, with a great array of wooden outbuildings. Here we had a
chance to try our luck with the Norwegian language in demanding "en
hest, saa straxt som muligt." This was what the guide-book told us
to say when we wanted a horse.
There is great fun in making a random cast on the surface of a
strange language. You cannot tell what will come up. It is like an
experiment in witchcraft. We should not have been at all surprised,
I must confess, if our preliminary incantation had brought forth a
cow or a basket of eggs.
But the good people seemed to divine our intentions; and while we
were waiting for one of the stable-boys to catch and harness the new
horse, a yellow-haired maiden inquired, in very fair English, if we
would not be pleased to have a cup of tea and some butter-bread;
which we did with great comfort.
The SKYDSGUT, or so-called postboy, for the next stage of the
journey, was a full-grown man of considerable weight. As he climbed
to his perch on our portmanteau, my lady Graygown congratulated me
on the prudence which had provided that one side of that receptacle
should be of an inflexible stiffness, quite incapable of being
crushed; otherwise, asked she, what would have become of her Sunday
frock under the pressure of this stern necessity of a postboy?
But I think we should not have cared very much if all our luggage
had been smashed on this journey, for the road now began to ascend,
and the views over the Etnadal, with its winding river, were of a
breadth and sweetness most consoling. Up and up we went, curving in
and out through the forest, crossing wild ravines and shadowy dells,
looking back at every turn on the wide landscape bathed in golden
light. At the station of Sveen, where we changed horse and postboy
again, it was already evening. The sun was down, but the mystical
radiance of the northern twilight illumined the sky. The dark firwoods
spread around us, and their odourous breath was diffused
through the cool, still air. We were crossing the level summit of
the plateau, twenty-three hundred feet above the sea. Two tiny
woodland lakes gleamed out among the trees. Then the road began to
slope gently towards the west, and emerged suddenly on the edge of
the forest, looking out over the long, lovely vale of Valders, with
snow-touched mountains on the horizon, and the river Baegna
shimmering along its bed, a thousand feet below us.
What a heart-enlarging outlook! What a keen joy of motion, as the
wheels rolled down the long incline, and the sure-footed pony swung
between the shafts and rattled his hoofs merrily on the hard road!
What long, deep breaths of silent pleasure in the crisp night air!
What wondrous mingling of lights in the afterglow of sunset, and the
primrose bloom of the first stars, and faint foregleamings of the
rising moon creeping over the hill behind us! What perfection of
companionship without words, as we rode together through a strange
land, along the edge of the dark!
When we finished the thirty-fifth mile, and drew up in the courtyard
of the station at Frydenlund, Graygown sprang out, with a little
sigh of regret.
"Is it last night," she cried, "or to-morrow morning? I have n't
the least idea what time it is; it seems as if we had been
travelling in eternity."
"It is just ten o'clock," I answered, "and the landlord says there
will be a hot supper of trout ready for us in five minutes."
It would be vain to attempt to give a daily record of the whole
journey in which we made this fair beginning. It was a most idle
and unsystematic pilgrimage. We wandered up and down, and turned
aside when fancy beckoned. Sometimes we hurried on as fast as the
horses would carry us, driving sixty or seventy miles a day;
sometimes we loitered and dawdled, as if we did not care whether we
got anywhere or not. If a place pleased us, we stayed and tried the
fishing. If we were tired of driving, we took to the water, and
travelled by steamer along a fjord, or hired a rowboat to cross from
point to point. One day we would be in a good little hotel, with
polyglot guests, and serving-maids in stagey Norse costumes,--like
the famous inn at Stalheim, which commands the amazing panorama of
the Naerodal. Another day we would lodge in a plain farmhouse like
the station at Nedre Vasenden, where eggs and fish were the staples
of diet, and the farmer's daughter wore the picturesque peasants'
dress, with its tall cap, without any dramatic airs. Lakes and
rivers, precipices and gorges, waterfalls and glaciers and snowy
mountains were our daily repast. We drove over five hundred miles
in various kinds of open wagons, KARIOLS for one, and STOLKJAERRES
for two, after we had left our comfortable gig behind us. We saw
the ancient dragon-gabled church of Burgund; and the delightful,
showery town of Bergen; and the gloomy cliffs of the Geiranger-Fjord
laced with filmy cataracts; and the bewitched crags of the Romsdal;
and the wide, desolate landscape of Jerkin; and a hundred other
unforgotten scenes. Somehow or other we went, (around and about,
and up and down, now on wheels, and now on foot, and now in a boat,)
all the way from Christiania to Throndhjem. My lady Graygown could
give you the exact itinerary, for she has been well brought up, and
always keeps a diary. All I know is, that we set out from one city
and arrived at the other, and we gathered by the way a collection of
instantaneous photographs. I am going to turn them over now, and
pick out a few of the clearest pictures.
III
Here is the bridge over the Naeselv at Fagernaes. Just below it is
a good pool for trout, but the river is broad and deep and swift.
It is difficult wading to get out within reach of the fish. I have
taken half a dozen small ones and come to the end of my cast. There
is a big one lying out in the middle of the river, I am sure. But
the water already rises to my hips; another step will bring it over
the top of my waders, and send me downstream feet uppermost.
"Take care!" cries Graygown from the grassy bank, where she sits
placidly crocheting some mysterious fabric of white yarn.
She does not see the large rock lying at the bottom of the river
just beyond me. If I can step on that, and stand there without
being swept away, I can reach the mid-current with my flies. It is
a long stride and a slippery foothold, but by good luck "the last
step which costs" is accomplished. The tiny black and orange hackle
goes curling out over the stream, lights softly, and swings around
with the current, folding and expanding its feathers as if it were
alive. The big trout takes it promptly the instant it passes over
him; and I play him and net him without moving from my perilous
perch.
Graygown waves her crochet-work like a flag, "Bravo!" she cries.
"That's a beauty, nearly two pounds! But do be careful about coming
back; you are not good enough to take any risks yet."
The station at Skogstad is a solitary farmhouse lying far up on the
bare hillside, with its barns and out-buildings grouped around a
central courtyard, like a rude fortress. The river travels along
the valley below, now wrestling its way through a narrow passage
among the rocks, now spreading out at leisure in a green meadow. As
we cross the bridge, the crystal water is changed to opal by the
sunset glow, and a gentle breeze ruffles the long pools, and the
trout are rising freely. It is the perfect hour for fishing. Would
Graygown dare to drive on alone to the gate of the fortress, and
blow upon the long horn which doubtless hangs beside it, and demand
admittance and a lodging, "in the name of the great Jehovah and the
Continental Congress,"--while I angle down the river a mile or so?
Certainly she would. What door is there in Europe at which the
American girl is afraid to knock? "But wait a moment. How do you
ask for fried chicken and pancakes in Norwegian? KYLLING OG
PANDEKAGE? How fierce it sounds! All right now. Run along and
fish."
The river welcomes me like an old friend. The tune that it sings is
the same that the flowing water repeats all around the world. Not
otherwise do the lively rapids carry the familiar air, and the
larger falls drone out a burly bass, along the west branch of the
Penobscot, or down the valley of the Bouquet. But here there are no
forests to conceal the course of the stream. It lies as free to the
view as a child's thought. As I follow on from pool to pool,
picking out a good trout here and there, now from a rocky corner
edged with foam, now from a swift gravelly run, now from a snug
hiding-place that the current has hollowed out beneath the bank, all
the way I can see the fortress far above me on the hillside.
I am as sure that it has already surrendered to Graygown as if I
could discern her white banner of crochet-work floating from the
battlements.
Just before dark, I climb the hill with a heavy basket of fish. The
castle gate is open. The scent of chicken and pancakes salutes the
weary pilgrim. In a cosy little parlour, adorned with fluffy mats
and pictures framed in pine-cones, lit by a hanging lamp with glass
pendants, sits the mistress of the occasion, calmly triumphant and
plying her crochet-needle.
There is something mysterious about a woman's fancy-work. It seems
to have all the soothing charm of the tobacco-plant, without its
inconveniences. Just to see her tranquillity, while she relaxes her
mind and busies her fingers with a bit of tatting or embroidery or
crochet, gives me a sense of being domesticated, a "homey" feeling,
anywhere in the wide world.
If you ever go to Norway, you must be sure to see the Loenvand. You
can set out from the comfortable hotel at Faleide, go up the Indvik
Fjord in a rowboat, cross over a two-mile hill on foot or by
carriage, spend a happy day on the lake, and return to your inn in
time for a late supper. The lake is perhaps the most beautiful in
Norway. Long and narrow, it lies like a priceless emerald of palest
green, hidden and guarded by jealous mountains. It is fed by huge
glaciers, which hang over the shoulders of the hills like ragged
cloaks of ice.
As we row along the shore, trolling in vain for the trout that live
in the ice-cold water, fragments of the tattered cloth-of-silver far
above us, on the opposite side, are loosened by the touch of the
summer sun, and fall from the precipice. They drift downward, at
first, as noiselessly as thistledowns; then they strike the rocks
and come crashing towards the lake with the hollow roar of an
avalanche.
At the head of the lake we find ourselves in an enormous
amphitheatre of mountains. Glaciers are peering down upon us.
Snow-fields glare at us with glistening eyes. Black crags seem to
bend above us with an eternal frown. Streamers of foam float from
the forehead of the hills and the lips of the dark ravines. But
there is a little river of cold, pure water flowing from one of the
rivers of ice, and a pleasant shelter of young trees and bushes
growing among the debris of shattered rocks; and there we build our
camp-fire and eat our lunch.
Hunger is a most impudent appetite. It makes a man forget all the
proprieties. What place is there so lofty, so awful, that he will
not dare to sit down in it and partake of food? Even on the side of
Mount Sinai, the elders of Israel spread their out-of-door table,
"and did eat and drink."
I see the Tarn of the Elk at this moment, just as it looked in the
clear sunlight of that August afternoon, ten years ago. Far down in
a hollow of the desolate hills it nestles, four thousand feet above
the sea. The moorland trail hangs high above it, and, though it is
a mile away, every curve of the treeless shore, every shoal and reef
in the light green water is clearly visible. With a powerful fieldglass
one can almost see the large trout for which the pond is
famous.
The shelter-hut on the bank is built of rough gray stones, and the
roof is leaky to the light as well as to the weather. But there are
two beds in it, one for my guide and one for me; and a practicable
fireplace, which is soon filled with a blaze of comfort. There is
also a random library of novels, which former fishermen have
thoughtfully left behind them. I like strong reading in the
wilderness. Give me a story with plenty of danger and wholesome
fighting in it,--"The Three Musketeers," or "Treasure Island," or
"The Afghan's Knife." Intricate studies of social dilemmas and
tales of mild philandering seem bloodless and insipid.
The trout in the Tarn of the Elk are large, undoubtedly, but they
are also few in number and shy in disposition. Either some of the
peasants have been fishing over them with the deadly "otter," or
else they belong to that variety of the trout family known as TRUTTA
DAMNOSA,--the species which you can see but cannot take. We watched
these aggravating fish playing on the surface at sunset; we saw them
dart beneath our boat in the early morning; but not until a driving
snowstorm set in, about noon of the second day, did we succeed in
persuading any of them to take the fly. Then they rose, for a
couple of hours, with amiable perversity. I caught five, weighing
between two and four pounds each, and stopped because my hands were
so numb that I could cast no longer.
Now for a long tramp over the hills and home. Yes, home; for yonder
in the white house at Drivstuen, with fuchsias and geraniums
blooming in the windows, and a pretty, friendly Norse girl to keep
her company, my lady is waiting for me. See, she comes running out
to the door, in the gathering dusk, with a red flower in her hair,
and hails me with the fisherman's greeting. WHAT LUCK?
Well, THIS luck, at all events! I can show you a few good fish, and
sit down with you to a supper of reindeer-venison and a quiet
evening of music and talk.
Shall I forget thee, hospitable Stuefloten, dearest to our memory of
all the rustic stations in Norway? There are no stars beside thy
name in the pages of Baedeker. But in the book of our hearts a
whole constellation is thine.
The long, low, white farmhouse stands on a green hill at the head of
the Romsdal. A flourishing crop of grass and flowers grows on the
stable-roof, and there is a little belfry with a big bell to call
the labourers home from the fields. In the corner of the livingroom
of the old house there is a broad fireplace built across the
angle. Curious cupboards are tucked away everywhere. The long
table in the dining-room groans thrice a day with generous fare.
There are as many kinds of hot bread as in a Virginia country-house;
the cream is thick enough to make a spoon stand up in amazement;
once, at dinner, we sat embarrassed before six different varieties
of pudding.
In the evening, when the saffron light is beginning to fade, we go
out and walk in the road before the house, looking down the long
mystical vale of the Rauma, or up to the purple western hills from
which the clear streams of the Ulvaa flow to meet us.
Above Stuefloten the Rauma lingers and meanders through a smoother
and more open valley, with broad beds of gravel and flowery meadows.
Here the trout and grayling grow fat and lusty, and here we angle
for them, day after day, in water so crystalline that when one steps
into the stream one hardly knows whether to expect a depth of six
inches or six feet.
Tiny English flies and leaders of gossamer are the tackle for such
water in midsummer. With this delicate outfit, and with a light
hand and a long line, one may easily outfish the native angler, and
fill a twelve-pound basket every fair day. I remember an old
Norwegian, an inveterate fisherman, whose footmarks we saw ahead of
us on the stream all through an afternoon. Footmarks I call them;
and so they were, literally, for there were only the prints of a
single foot to be seen on the banks of sand, and between them, a
series of small, round, deep holes.
"What kind of a bird made those marks, Frederik?" I asked my
faithful guide.
"That is old Pedersen," he said, "with his wooden leg. He makes a
dot after every step. We shall catch him in a little while."
Sure enough, about six o'clock we saw him standing on a grassy
point, hurling his line, with a fat worm on the end of it, far
across the stream, and letting it drift down with the current. But
the water was too fine for that style of fishing, and the poor old
fellow had but a half dozen little fish. My creel was already
overflowing, so I emptied out all of the grayling into his bag, and
went on up the river to complete my tale of trout before dark.
And when the fishing is over, there is Graygown with the wagon,
waiting at the appointed place under the trees, beside the road.
The sturdy white pony trots gayly homeward. The pale yellow stars
blossom out above the hills again, as they did on that first night
when we were driving down into the Valders. Frederik leans over the
back of the seat, telling us marvellous tales, in his broken
English, of the fishing in a certain lake among the mountains, and
of the reindeer-shooting on the fjeld beyond it.
"It is sad that you go to-morrow," says he "but you come back
another year, I think, to fish in that lake, and to shoot those
reindeer."
Yes, Frederik, we are coming back to Norway some day, perhaps,--who
can tell? It is one of the hundred places that we are vaguely
planning to revisit. For, though we did not see the midnight sun
there, we saw the honeymoon most distinctly. And it was bright
enough to take pictures by its light.
WHO OWNS THE MOUNTAINS?
"My heart is fixed firm and stable in the belief that ultimately
the sunshine and the summer, the flowers and the azure sky, shall
become, as it were, interwoven into man's existence. He shall take
from all their beauty and enjoy their glory."--RICHARD JEFFERIES:
The Life of the Fields.
It was the little lad that asked the question; and the answer also,
as you will see, was mainly his.
We had been keeping Sunday afternoon together in our favourite
fashion, following out that pleasant text which tells us to "behold
the fowls of the air." There is no injunction of Holy Writ less
burdensome in acceptance, or more profitable in obedience, than this
easy out-of-doors commandment. For several hours we walked in the
way of this precept, through the untangled woods that lie behind the
Forest Hills Lodge, where a pair of pigeon-hawks had their nest; and
around the brambly shores of the small pond, where Maryland yellowthroats
and song-sparrows were settled; and under the lofty hemlocks
of the fragment of forest across the road, where rare warblers
flitted silently among the tree-tops. The light beneath the
evergreens was growing dim as we came out from their shadow into the
widespread glow of the sunset, on the edge of a grassy hill,
overlooking the long valley of the Gale River, and uplooking to the
Franconia Mountains.
It was the benediction hour. The placid air of the day shed a new
tranquillity over the consoling landscape. The heart of the earth
seemed to taste a repose more perfect than that of common days. A
hermit-thrush, far up the vale, sang his vesper hymn; while the
swallows, seeking their evening meal, circled above the river-fields
without an effort, twittering softly, now and then, as if they must
give thanks. Slight and indefinable touches in the scene, perhaps
the mere absence of the tiny human figures passing along the road or
labouring in the distant meadows, perhaps the blue curls of smoke
rising lazily from the farmhouse chimneys, or the family groups
sitting under the maple-trees before the door, diffused a sabbath
atmosphere over the world.
Then said the lad, lying on the grass beside me, "Father, who owns
the mountains?"
I happened to have heard, the day before, of two or three lumber
companies that had bought
some of the woodland slopes; so I told him their names, adding that
there were probably a good many different owners, whose claims taken
all together would cover the whole Franconia range of hills.
"Well," answered the lad, after a moment of silence, "I don't see
what difference that makes. Everybody can look at them."
They lay stretched out before us in the level sunlight, the sharp
peaks outlined against the sky, the vast ridges of forest sinking
smoothly towards the valleys. the deep hollows gathering purple
shadows in their bosoms, and the little foothills standing out in
rounded promontories of brighter green from the darker mass behind
them.
Far to the east, the long comb of Twin Mountain extended itself back
into the untrodden wilderness. Mount Garfield lifted a clear-cut
pyramid through the translucent air. The huge bulk of Lafayette
ascended majestically in front of us, crowned with a rosy diadem of
rocks. Eagle Cliff and Bald Mountain stretched their line of
scalloped peaks across the entrance to the Notch. Beyond that
shadowy vale, the swelling summits of Cannon Mountain rolled away to
meet the tumbling waves of Kinsman, dominated by one loftier crested
billow that seemed almost ready to curl and break out of green
silence into snowy foam. Far down the sleeping Landaff valley the
undulating dome of Moosilauke trembled in the distant blue.
They were all ours, from crested cliff to wooded base. The solemn
groves of firs and spruces, the plumed sierras of lofty pines, the
stately pillared forests of birch and beech, the wild ravines, the
tremulous thickets of silvery poplar, the bare peaks with their wide
outlooks, and the cool vales resounding with the ceaseless song of
little rivers,--we knew and loved them all; they ministered peace
and joy to us; they were all ours, though we held no title deeds and
our ownership had never been recorded.
What is property, after all? The law says there are two kinds, real
and personal. But it seems to me that the only real property is
that which is truly personal, that which we take into our inner life
and make our own forever, by understanding and admiration and
sympathy and love. This is the only kind of possession that is
worth anything.
A gallery of great paintings adorns the house of the Honourable
Midas Bond, and every year adds a new treasure to his collection.
He knows how much they cost him, and he keeps the run of the
quotations at the auction sales, congratulating himself as the price
of the works of his well-chosen artists rises in the scale, and the
value of his art treasures is enhanced. But why should he call them
his? He is only their custodian. He keeps them well varnished, and
framed in gilt. But he never passes through those gilded frames
into the world of beauty that lies behind the painted canvas. He
knows nothing of those lovely places from which the artist's soul
and hand have drawn their inspiration. They are closed and barred
to him. He has bought the pictures, but he cannot buy the key. The
poor art student who wanders through his gallery, lingering with awe
and love before the masterpieces, owns them far more truly than
Midas does.
Pomposus Silverman purchased a rich library a few years ago. The
books were rare and costly. That was the reason why Pomposus bought
them. He was proud to feel that he was the possessor of literary
treasures which were not to be found in the houses of his wealthiest
acquaintances. But the threadbare Bucherfreund, who was engaged at
a slender salary to catalogue the library and take care of it,
became the real proprietor. Pomposus paid for the books, but
Bucherfreund enjoyed them.
I do not mean to say that the possession of much money is always a
barrier to real wealth of mind and heart. Nor would I maintain that
all the poor of this world are rich in faith and heirs of the
kingdom. But some of them are. And if some of the rich of this
world (through the grace of Him with whom all things are possible)
are also modest in their tastes, and gentle in their hearts, and
open in their minds, and ready to be pleased with unbought
pleasures, they simply share in the best things which are provided
for all.
I speak not now of the strife that men wage over the definition and
the laws of property. Doubtless there is much here that needs to be
set right. There are men and women in the world who are shut out
from the right to earn a living, so poor that they must perish for
want of daily bread, so full of misery that there is no room for the
tiniest seed of joy in their lives. This is the lingering shame of
civilization. Some day, perhaps, we shall find the way to banish
it. Some day, every man shall have his title to a share in the
world's great work and the world's large joy.
But meantime it is certain that, where there are a hundred poor
bodies who suffer from physical privation, there are a thousand poor
souls who suffer from spiritual poverty. To relive this greater
suffering there needs no change of laws, only a change of heart.
What does it profit a man to be the landed proprietor of countless
acres unless he can reap the harvest of delight that blooms from
every rood of God's earth for the seeing eye and the loving spirit?
And who can reap that harvest so closely that there shall not be
abundant gleaning left for all mankind? The most that a wide estate
can yield to its legal owner is a living. But the real owner can
gather from a field of goldenrod, shining in the August sunlight, an
unearned increment of delight.
We measure success by accumulation. The measure is false. The true
measure is appreciation. He who loves most has most.
How foolishly we train ourselves for the work of life! We give our
most arduous and eager efforts to the cultivation of those faculties
which will serve us in the competitions of the forum and the marketplace.
But if we were wise, we should care infinitely more for the
unfolding of those inward, secret, spiritual powers by which alone
we can become the owners of anything that is worth having. Surely
God is the great proprietor. Yet all His works He has given away.
He holds no title-deeds. The one thing that is His, is the perfect
understanding, the perfect joy, the perfect love, of all things that
He has made. To a share in this high ownership He welcomes all who
are poor in spirit. This is the earth which the meek inherit. This
is the patrimony of the saints in light.
"Come, laddie," I said to my comrade, "let us go home. You and I
are very rich. We own the mountains. But we can never sell them,
and we don't want to."
A LAZY, IDLE BROOK
"Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be
sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things. And it is not
by any means certain that a manís business is the most important
thing he has to do."--ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: An Apology for Idlers.
I
A CASUAL INTRODUCTION
On the South Shore of Long Island, all things incline to a natural
somnolence. There are no ambitious mountains, no braggart cliffs,
no hasty torrents, no hustling waterfalls in that land,
"In which it seemeth always afternoon."
The salt meadows sleep in the summer sun; the farms and marketgardens
yield a placid harvest to a race of singularly unhurried
tillers of the soil; the low hills rise with gentle slopes, not
caring to get too high in the world, only far enough to catch a
pleasant glimpse of the sea and a breath of fresh air; the very
trees grow leisurely, as if they felt that they had "all the time
there is." And from this dreamy land, close as it lies to the
unresting ocean, the tumult of the breakers and the foam of everturning
tides are shut off by the languid lagoons of the Great South
Bay and a long range of dunes, crested with wire-grass, bay-bushes,
and wild-roses.
In such a country you could not expect a little brook to be noisy,
fussy, energetic. If it were not lazy, it would be out of keeping.
But the actual and undisguised idleness of this particular brook was
another affair, and one in which it was distinguished among its
fellows. For almost all the other little rivers of the South Shore,
lazy as they may be by nature, yet manage to do some kind of work
before they finish the journey from their crystal-clear springs into
the brackish waters of the bay. They turn the wheels of sleepy
gristmills, while the miller sits with his hands in his pockets
underneath the willow-trees. They fill reservoirs out of which
great steam-engines pump the water to quench the thirst of Brooklyn.
Even the smaller streams tarry long enough in their seaward
sauntering to irrigate a few cranberry-bogs and so provide that
savoury sauce which makes the Long Island turkey a fitter subject
for Thanksgiving.
But this brook of which I speak did none of these useful things. It
was absolutely out of business.
There was not a mill, nor a reservoir, nor a cranberry-bog, on all
its course of a short mile. The only profitable affair it ever
undertook was to fill a small ice-pond near its entrance into the
Great South Bay. You could hardly call this a very energetic
enterprise. It amounted to little more than a good-natured consent
to allow itself to be used by the winter for the making of ice, if
the winter happened to be cold enough. Even this passive industry
came to nothing; for the water, being separated from the bay only by
a short tideway under a wooden bridge on the south country road, was
too brackish to freeze easily; and the ice, being pervaded with
weeds, was not much relished by the public. So the wooden icehouse,
innocent of paint, and toned by the weather to a soft, sadcoloured
gray, stood like an improvised ruin among the pine-trees
beside the pond.
It was through this unharvested ice-pond, this fallow field of
water, that my lady Graygown and I entered on acquaintance with our
lazy, idle brook. We had a house, that summer, a few miles down the
bay. But it was a very small house, and the room that we like best
was out of doors. So we spent much time in a sailboat,--by name
"The Patience,"--making voyages of exploration into watery corners
and byways. Sailing past the wooden bridge one day, when a strong
east wind had made a very low tide, we observed the water flowing
out beneath the road with an eddying current. We were interested to
discover where such a stream came from. But the sailboat could not
go under the bridge, nor even make a landing on the shore without
risk of getting aground. The next day we came back in a rowboat to
follow the clue of curiosity. The tide was high now, and we passed
with the reversed current under the bridge, almost bumping our heads
against the timbers. Emerging upon the pond, we rowed across its
shallow, weed-encumbered waters, and were introduced without
ceremony to one of the most agreeable brooks that we had ever met.
It was quite broad where it came into the pond,--a hundred feet from
side to side,--bordered with flags and rushes and feathery meadow
grasses. The real channel meandered in sweeping curves from bank to
bank, and the water, except in the swifter current, was filled with
an amazing quantity of some aquatic moss. The woods came straggling
down on either shore. There were fallen trees in the stream here
and there. On one of the points an old swamp-maple, with its
decrepit branches and its leaves already touched with the hectic
colours of decay, hung far out over the water which was undermining
it, looking and leaning downward, like an aged man who bends, halfsadly
and half-willingly, towards the grave.
But for the most part the brook lay wide open to the sky, and the
tide, rising and sinking somewhat irregularly in the pond below,
made curious alternations in its depth and in the swiftness of its
current. For about half a mile we navigated this lazy little river,
and then we found that rowing would carry us no farther, for we came
to a place where the stream issued with a livelier flood from an
archway in a thicket.
This woodland portal was not more than four feet wide, and the
branches of the small trees were closely interwoven overhead. We
shipped the oars and took one of them for a paddle. Stooping down,
we pushed the boat through the archway and found ourselves in the
Fairy Dell. It was a long, narrow bower, perhaps four hundred feet
from end to end, with the brook dancing through it in a joyous,
musical flow over a bed of clean yellow sand and white pebbles.
There were deep places in the curves where you could hardly touch
bottom with an oar, and shallow places in the straight runs where
the boat would barely float. Not a ray of unbroken sunlight leaked
through the green roof of this winding corridor; and all along the
sides there were delicate mosses and tall ferns and wildwood flowers
that love the shade.
At the upper end of the bower our progress in the boat was barred by
a low bridge, on a forgotten road that wound through the pine-woods.
Here I left my lady Graygown, seated on the shady corner of the
bridge with a book, swinging her feet over the stream, while I set
out to explore its further course. Above the wood-road there were
no more fairy dells, nor easy-going estuaries. The water came down
through the most complicated piece of underbrush that I have ever
encountered. Alders and swamp maples and pussy-willows and gray
birches grew together in a wild confusion. Blackberry bushes and
fox-grapes and cat-briers trailed and twisted themselves anger.
What a pretty battle it is, and in a good cause, too! Waste no pity
on that big black ruffian. He is a villain and a thief, an eggstealer,
an ogre, a devourer of unfledged innocents. The kingbirds
are not afraid of him, knowing that he is a coward at heart. They
fly upon him, now from below, now from above. They buffet him from
one side and from the other. They circle round him like a pair of
swift gunboats round an antiquated man-of-war. They even perch upon
his back and dash their beaks into his neck and pluck feathers from
his piratical plumage. At last his lumbering flight has carried him
far enough away, and the brave little defenders fly back to the
nest, poising above it on quivering wings for a moment, then dipping
down swiftly in pursuit of some passing insect. The war is over.
Courage has had its turn. Now tenderness comes into play.in an
incredible tangle. There was only one way to advance, and that was
to wade in the middle of the brook, stooping low, lifting up the
pendulous alder-branches, threading a tortuous course, now under and
now over the innumerable obstacles, as a darning-needle is pushed in
and out through the yarn of a woollen stocking.
It was dark and lonely in that difficult passage. The brook divided
into many channels, turning this way and that way, as if it were
lost in the woods. There were huge clumps of OSMUNDA REGALIS
spreading their fronds in tropical profusion. Mouldering logs were
covered with moss. The water gurgled slowly into deep corners under
the banks. Catbirds and blue jays fluttered screaming from the
thickets. Cotton-tailed rabbits darted away, showing the white flag
of fear. Once I thought I saw the fuscous gleam of a red fox
stealing silently through the brush. It would have been no surprise
to hear the bark of a raccoon, or see the eyes of a wildcat gleaming
through the leaves.
For more than an hour I was pushing my way through this miniature
wilderness of half a mile; and then I emerged suddenly, to find
myself face to face with--a railroad embankment and the afternoon
express, with its parlour-cars, thundering down to Southampton!
It was a strange and startling contrast. The explorerís joy, the
sense of adventure, the feeling of wildness and freedom, withered
and crumpled somewhat preposterously at the sight of the parlourcars.
My scratched hands and wet boots and torn coat seemed unkempt
and disreputable. Perhaps some of the well-dressed people looking
out at the windows of the train were the friends with whom we were
to dine on Saturday. BATECHE! What would they say to such a
costume as mine? What did I care what they said!
But, all the same, it was a shock, a disenchantment, to find that
civilization, with all its absurdities and conventionalities, was so
threateningly close to my new-found wilderness. My first enthusiasm
was not a little chilled as I walked back, along an open woodland
path, to the bridge where Graygown was placidly reading. Reading, I
say, though her book was closed, and her brown eyes were wandering
over the green leaves of the thicket, and the white clouds drifting,
drifting lazily across the blue deep of the sky.
II
A BETTER ACQUAINTANCE
On the voyage home, she gently talked me out of my disappointment,
and into a wiser frame of mind.
It was a surprise, of course, she admitted, to find that our
wilderness was so little, and to discover the trail of a parlour-car
on the edge of Paradise. But why not turn the surprise around, and
make it pleasant instead of disagreeable? Why not look at the
contrast from the side that we liked best?
It was not necessary that everybody should take the same view of
life that pleased us. The world would not get on very well without
people who preferred parlour-cars to canoes, and patent-leather
shoes to India-rubber boots, and ten-course dinners to picnics in
the woods. These good people were unconsciously toiling at the hard
and necessary work of life in order that we, of the chosen and
fortunate few, should be at liberty to enjoy the best things in the
world.
Why should we neglect our opportunities, which were also our real
duties? The nervous disease of civilization might prevail all
around us, but that ought not to destroy our grateful enjoyment of
the lucid intervals that were granted to us by a merciful
Providence.
Why should we not take this little untamed brook, running its humble
course through the borders of civilized life and midway between two
flourishing summer resorts,--a brook without a single house or a
cultivated field on its banks, as free and beautiful and secluded as
if it flowed through miles of trackless forest,--why not take this
brook as a sign that the ordering of the universe had a "good
intention" even for inveterate idlers, and that the great Arranger
of the world felt some kindness for such gipsy-hearts as ours? What
law, human or divine, was there to prevent us from making this
stream our symbol of deliverance from the conventional and
commonplace, our guide to liberty and a quiet mind?
So reasoned Graygown with her
"most silver flow
Of subtle-paced counsel in distress."
And, according to her word, so did we. That lazy, idle brook became
to us one of the best of friends; the pathfinder of happiness on
many a bright summer day; and, through long vacations, the faithful
encourager of indolence.
Indolence in the proper sense of the word, you understand. The
meaning which is commonly given to it, as Archbishop Trench pointed
out in his suggestive book about WORDS AND THEIR USES, is altogether
false. To speak of indolence as if it were a vice is just a great
big verbal slander.
Indolence is a virtue. It comes from two Latin words, which mean
freedom from anxiety or grief. And that is a wholesome state of
mind. There are times and seasons when it is even a pious and
blessed state of mind. Not to be in a hurry; not to be ambitious or
jealous or resentful; not to feel envious of anybody; not to fret
about to-day nor worry about to-morrow,--that is the way we ought
all to feel at some time in our lives; and that is the kind of
indolence in which our brook faithfully encouraged us.
ëT is an age in which such encouragement is greatly needed. We have
fallen so much into the habit of being always busy that we know not
how nor when to break it off with firmness. Our business tags after
us into the midst of our pleasures, and we are ill at ease beyond
reach of the telegraph and the daily newspaper. We agitate
ourselves amazingly about a multitude of affairs,--the politics of
Europe, the state of the weather all around the globe, the marriages
and festivities of very rich people, and the latest novelties in
crime, none of which are of vital interest to us. The more earnest
souls among us are cultivating a vicious tendency to Summer Schools,
and Seaside Institutes of Philosophy, and Mountaintop Seminaries of
Modern Languages.
We toil assiduously to cram something more into those scrap-bags of
knowledge which we fondly call our minds. Seldom do we rest
tranquil long enough to find out whether there is anything in them
already that is of real value,--any native feeling, any original
thought, which would like to come out and sun itself for a while in
quiet.
For my part, I am sure that I stand more in need of a deeper sense
of contentment with life than of a knowledge of the Bulgarian
tongue, and that all the paradoxes of Hegel would not do me so much
good as one hour of vital sympathy with the careless play of
children. The Marquis du Paty de líHuitre may espouse the daughter
and heiress of the Honourable James Bulger with all imaginable pomp,
if he will. CA NE MíINTRIGUE POINT DU TOUT. I would rather stretch
myself out on the grass and watch yonder pair of kingbirds carrying
luscious flies to their young ones in the nest, or chasing away the
marauding crow with shrill cries of The
young birds, all ignorant of the passing danger, but always
conscious of an insatiable hunger, are uttering loud remonstrances
and plaintive demands for food. Domestic life begins again, and
they that sow not, neither gather into barns, are fed.
Do you suppose that this wondrous stage of earth was set, and all
the myriad actors on it
taught to play their parts, without a spectator in view? Do you
think that there is anything better for you and me to do, now and
then, than to sit down quietly in a humble seat, and watch a few
scenes in the drama? Has it not something to say to us, and do we
not understand it best when we have a peaceful heart and free from
dolor? That is what IN-DOLENCE means, and there are no better
teachers of it then the light-hearted birds and untoiling flowers,
commended by the wisest of all masters to our consideration; nor can
we find a more pleasant pedagogue to lead us to their school than a
small, merry brook.
And this was what our chosen stream did for us. It was always
luring us away from an artificial life into restful companionship
with nature.
Suppose, for example, we found ourselves growing a bit dissatisfied
with the domestic arrangements of our little cottage, and coveting
the splendours of a grander establishment. An afternoon on the
brook was a good cure for that folly. Or suppose a day came when
there was an imminent prospect of many formal calls. We had an
important engagement up the brook; and while we kept it we could
think with satisfaction of the joy of our callers when they
discovered that they could discharge their whole duty with a piece
of pasteboard. This was an altruistic pleasure. Or suppose that a
few friends were coming to supper, and there were no flowers for the
supper-table. We could easily have bought them in the village. But
it was far more to our liking to take the children up the brook, and
come back with great bunches of wild white honeysuckle and blue
flag, or posies of arrowheads and cardinal-flowers. Or suppose that
I was very unwisely and reluctantly labouring at some serious piece
of literary work, promised for the next number of THE SCRIBBLERíS
REVIEW; and suppose that in the midst of this labour the sad news
came to me that the fisherman had forgotten to leave any fish at our
cottage that morning. Should my innocent babes and my devoted wife
be left to perish of starvation while I continued my poetical
comparison of the two Williams, Shakspeare and Watson? Inhuman
selfishness! Of course it was my plain duty to sacrifice my
inclinations, and get my fly-rod, and row away across the bay, with
a deceptive appearance of cheerfulness, to catch a basket of trout
in--
III
THE SECRETS OF INTIMACY
THERE! I came within eight letters of telling the name of the
brook, a thing that I am firmly resolved not to do. If it were an
ordinary fishless little river, or even a stream with nothing better
than grass-pike and sunfish in it, you should have the name and
welcome. But when a brook contains speckled trout, and when their
presence is known to a very few persons who guard the secret as the
dragon guarded the golden apples of the Hesperides, and when the
size of the trout is large beyond the dreams of hope,--well, when
did you know a true angler who would willingly give away the name of
such a brook as that? You may find an encourager of indolence in
almost any stream of the South Side, and I wish you joy of your
brook. But if you want to catch trout in mine you must discover it
for yourself, or perhaps go with me some day, and solemnly swear
secrecy.
That was the way in which the freedom of the stream was conferred
upon me. There was a small boy in the village, the son of rich but
respectable parents, and an inveterate all-round sportsman, aged
fourteen years, with whom I had formed a close intimacy. I was
telling him about the pleasure of exploring the idle brook, and
expressing the opinion that in bygone days, (in that mythical "forty
years ago" when all fishing was good), there must have been trout in
it. A certain look came over the boyís face. He gazed at me
solemnly, as if he were searching the inmost depths of my character
before he spoke.
"Say, do you want to know something?"
I assured him that an increase of knowledge was the chief aim of my
life.
"Do you promise you wonít tell?"
I expressed my readiness to be bound to silence by the most awful
pledge that the law would sanction.
"Wish you may die?"
I not only wished that I might die, but was perfectly certain that I
would die.
"Well, whatís the matter with catching trout in that brook now? Do
you want to go with me next Saturday? I saw four or five bully ones
last week, and got three."
On the appointed day we made the voyage, landed at the upper bridge,
walked around by the woodpath to the railroad embankment, and began
to worm our way down through the tangled wilderness. Fly-fishing,
of course, was out of the question. The only possible method of
angling was to let the line, baited with a juicy "garden hackle,"
drift down the current as far as possible before you, under the
alder-branches and the cat-briers, into the holes and corners of the
stream. Then, if there came a gentle tug on the rod, you must
strike, to one side or the other, as the branches might allow, and
trust wholly to luck for a chance to play the fish. Many a trout we
lost that day,--the largest ones, of course,--and many a hook was
embedded in a sunken log, or hopelessly entwined among the boughs
overhead. But when we came out at the bridge, very wet and
disheveled, we had seven pretty fish, the heaviest about half a
pound. The Fairy Dell yielded a brace of smaller ones, and
altogether we were reasonably happy as we took up the oars and
pushed out upon the open stream.
But if there were fish above, why should there not be fish below?
It was about sunset, the anglerís golden hour. We were already
committed to the crime of being late for supper. It would add
little to our guilt and much to our pleasure to drift slowly down
the middle of the brook and cast the artful fly in the deeper
corners on either shore. So I took off the vulgar bait-hook and put
on a delicate leader with a Queen of the Water for a tail-fly and a
Yellow Sally for a dropper,--innocent little confections of feathers
and tinsel, dressed on the tiniest hooks, and calculated to tempt
the appetite or the curiosity of the most capricious trout.
For a long time the whipping of the water produced no result, and it
seemed as if the dainty style of angling were destined to prove less
profitable than plain fishing with a worm. But presently we came to
an elbow of the brook, just above the estuary, where there was quite
a stretch of clear water along the lower side, with two half-sunken
logs sticking out from the bank, against which the current had
drifted a broad raft of weeds. I made a long cast, and sent the
tail-fly close to the edge of the weeds. There was a swelling
ripple on the surface of the water, and a noble fish darted from
under the logs, dashed at the fly, missed it, and whirled back to
his shelter.
"Gee!" said the boy, "that was a whacker! He made a wake like a
steamboat."
It was a moment for serious thought. What was best to be done with
that fish? Leave him to settle down for the night and come back
after him another day? Or try another cast for him at once? A fish
on Saturday evening is worth two on Monday morning. I changed the
Queen of the Water for a Royal Coachman tied on a number fourteen
hook,--white wings, peacock body with a belt of crimson silk,--and
sent it out again, a foot farther up the stream and a shade closer
to the weeds. As it settled on the water, there was a flash of gold
from the shadow beneath the logs, and a quick turn of the wrist made
the tiny hook fast in the fish. He fought wildly to get back to the
shelter of his logs, but the four ounce rod had spring enough in it
to hold him firmly away from that dangerous retreat. Then he
splurged up and down the open water, and made fierce dashes among
the grassy shallows, and seemed about to escape a dozen times. But
at last his force was played out; he came slowly towards the boat,
turning on his side, and I netted him in my hat.
"Bully for us;" said the boy, "we got him! What a dandy!"
It was indeed one of the handsomest fish that I have ever taken on
the South Side,--just short of two pounds and a quarter,--small
head, broad tail, and well-rounded sides coloured with orange and
blue and gold and red. A pair of the same kind, one weighing two
pounds and the other a pound and three quarters, were taken by
careful fishing down the lower end of the pool, and then we rowed
home through the dusk, pleasantly convinced that there is no virtue
more certainly rewarded than the patience of anglers, and entirely
willing to put up with a cold supper and a mild reproof for the sake
of sport.
Of course we could not resist the temptation to show those fish to
the neighbours. But, equally of course, we evaded the request to
give precise information as to the precise place where they were
caught. Indeed, I fear that there must have been something confused
in our description of where we had been on that afternoon. Our
carefully selected language may have been open to misunderstanding.
At all events, the next day, which was the Sabbath, there was a row
of eager but unprincipled anglers sitting on a bridge OVER ANOTHER
STREAM, and fishing for trout with worms and large expectations, but
without visible results.
The boy and I agreed that if this did not teach a good moral lesson
it was not our fault.
I obtained the boyís consent to admit the partner of my lifeís joys
and two of our children to the secret of the brook, and thereafter,
when we visited it, we took the fly-rod with us. If by chance
another boat passed us in the estuary, we were never fishing, but
only gathering flowers, or going for a picnic, or taking
photographs. But when the uninitiated ones had passed by, we would
get out the rod again, and try a few more casts.
One day in particular I remember, when Graygown and little Teddy
were my companions. We really had no hopes of angling, for the hour
was mid-noon, and the day was warm and still. But suddenly the
trout, by one of those unaccountable freaks which make their
disposition so interesting and attractive, began to rise all about
us in a bend of the stream.
"Look!" said Teddy; "wherever you see one of those big smiles on the
water, I believe thereís a fish!"
Fortunately the rod was at hand. Graygown and Teddy managed the
boat and the landing-net with consummate skill. We landed no less
than a dozen beautiful fish at that most unlikely hour and then
solemnly shook hands all around.
There is a peculiar pleasure in doing a thing like this, catching
trout in a place where nobody thinks of looking for them, and at an
hour when everybody believes they cannot be caught. It is more fun
to take one good fish out of an old, fished-out stream, near at hand
to the village, than to fill a basket from some far-famed and wellstocked
water. It is the unexpected touch that tickles our sense of
pleasure. While life lasts, we are always hoping for it and
expecting it. There is no country so civilized, no existence so
humdrum, that there is not room enough in it somewhere for a lazy,
idle brook, an encourager of indolence, with hope of happy
surprises.
THE OPEN FIRE
"It is a vulgar notion that a fire is only for heat. A chief value
of it is, however, to look at. And it is never twice the same."--
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER: Backlog Studies.
I
LIGHTING UP
Man is the animal that has made friends with the fire.
All the other creatures, in their natural state, are afraid of it.
They look upon it with wonder and dismay. It fascinates them,
sometimes, with its glittering eyes in the night. The squirrels and
the hares come pattering softly towards it through the underbrush
around the new camp. The fascinated deer stares into the blaze of
the jack-light while the hunterís canoe creeps through the lilypads.
But the charm that masters them is one of dread, not of love.
It is the witchcraft of the serpentís lambent look. When they know
what it means, when the heat of the fire touches them, or even when
its smell comes clearly to their most delicate sense, they recognize
it as their enemy, the Wild Huntsman whose red hounds can follow,
follow for days without wearying, growing stronger and more furious
with every turn of the chase. Let but a trail of smoke drift down
the wind across the forest, and all the game for miles and miles
will catch the signal for fear and flight.
Many of the animals have learned how to make houses for themselves.
The CABANE of the beaver is a wonder of neatness and comfort, much
preferable to the wigwam of his Indian hunter. The muskrat knows
how thick and high to build the dome of his waterside cottage, in
order to protect himself against the frost of the coming winter and
the floods of the following spring. The woodchuckís house has two
or three doors; and the squirrelís dwelling is provided with a good
bed and a convenient storehouse for nuts and acorns. The sportive
otters have a toboggan slide in front of their residence; and the
moose in winter make a "yard," where they can take exercise
comfortably and find shelter for sleep. But there is one thing
lacking in all these various dwellings,--a fireplace.
Man is the only creature that dares to light a fire and to live with
it. The reason? Because he alone has learned how to put it out.
It is true that two of his humbler friends have been converted to
fire-worship. The dog and the cat, being half-humanized, have begun
to love the fire. I suppose that a cat seldom comes so near to
feeling a true sense of affection as when she has finished her
saucer of bread and milk, and stretched herself luxuriously
underneath the kitchen stove, while her faithful mistress washes up
the dishes. As for a dog, I am sure that his admiring love for his
master is never greater than when they come in together from the
hunt, wet and tired, and the man gathers a pile of wood in front of
the tent, touches it with a tiny magic wand, and suddenly the clear,
consoling flame springs up, saying cheerfully, "Here we are, at home
in the forest; come into the warmth; rest, and eat, and sleep."
When the weary, shivering dog sees this miracle, he knows that his
master is a great man and a lord of things.
After all, that is the only real open fire. Wood is the fuel for
it. Out-of-doors is the place for it. A furnace is an underground
prison for a toiling slave. A stove is a cage for a tame bird.
Even a broad hearthstone and a pair of glittering andirons--the best
ornament of a room--must be accepted as an imitation of the real
thing. The veritable open fire is built in the open, with the whole
earth for a fireplace and the sky for a chimney.
To start a fire in the open is by no means as easy as it looks. It
is one of those simple tricks that every one thinks he can perform
until he tries it.
To do it without trying,--accidentally and unwillingly,--that, of
course, is a thing for which any fool is fit. You knock out the
ashes from your pipe on a fallen log; you toss the end of a match
into a patch of grass, green on top, but dry as punk underneath; you
scatter the dead brands of an old fire among the moss,--a
conflagration is under way before you know it.
A fire in the woods is one thing; a comfort and a joy. Fire in the
woods is another thing; a terror, an uncontrollable fury, a burning
shame.
But the lighting up of a proper fire, kindly, approachable,
serviceable, docile, is a work of intelligence. If, perhaps, you
have to do it in the rain, with a single match, it requires no
little art and skill.
There is plenty of wood everywhere, but not a bit to burn. The
fallen trees are waterlogged. The dead leaves are as damp as grief.
The charred sticks that you find in an old fireplace are absolutely
incombustible. Do not trust the handful of withered twigs and
branches that you gather from the spruce-trees. They seem dry, but
they are little better for your purpose than so much asbestos. You
make a pile of them in some apparently suitable hollow, and lay a
few larger sticks on top. Then you hastily scratch your solitary
match on the seat of your trousers and thrust it into the pile of
twigs. What happens? The wind whirls around in your stupid little
hollow, and the blue flame of the sulphur spirts and sputters for an
instant, and then goes out. Or perhaps there is a moment of
stillness; the match flares up bravely; the nearest twigs catch
fire, crackling and sparkling; you hurriedly lay on more sticks; but
the fire deliberately dodges them, creeps to the corner of the pile
where the twigs are fewest and dampest, snaps feebly a few times,
and expires in smoke. Now where are you? How far is it to the
nearest match?
If you are wise, you will always make your fire before you light it.
Time is never saved by doing a thing badly.
II
THE CAMP-FIRE
In the making of fires there is as much difference as in the
building of houses. Everything depends upon the purpose that you
have in view. There is the camp-fire, and the cooking-fire, and the
smudge-fire, and the little friendship-fire,--not to speak of other
minor varieties. Each of these has its own proper style of
architecture, and to mix them is false art and poor economy.
The object of the camp-fire is to give heat, and incidentally light,
to your tent or shanty. You can hardly build this kind of a fire
unless you have a good axe and know how to chop. For the first
thing that you need is a solid backlog, the thicker the better, to
hold the heat and reflect it into the tent. This log must not be
too dry, or it will burn out quickly. Neither must it be too damp,
else it will smoulder and discourage the fire. The best wood for it
is the body of a yellow birch, and, next to that, a green balsam.
It should be five or six feet long, and at least two and a half feet
in diameter. If you cannot find a tree thick enough, cut two or
three lengths of a smaller one; lay the thickest log on the ground
first, about ten or twelve feet in front of the tent; drive two
strong stakes behind it, slanting a little backward; and lay the
other logs on top of the first, resting against the stakes.
Now you are ready for the hand-chunks, or andirons. These are
shorter sticks of wood, eight or ten inches thick, laid at right
angles to the backlog, four or five feet apart. Across these you
are to build up the firewood proper.
Use a dry spruce-tree, not one that has fallen, but one that is dead
and still standing, if you want a lively, snapping fire. Use a hard
maple or a hickory if you want a fire that will burn steadily and
make few sparks. But if you like a fire to blaze up at first with a
splendid flame, and then burn on with an enduring heat far into the
night, a young white birch with the bark on is the tree to choose.
Six or eight round sticks of this laid across the hand-chunks, with
perhaps a few quarterings of a larger tree, will make a glorious
fire.
But before you put these on, you must be ready to light up. A few
splinters of dry spruce or pine or balsam, stood endwise against the
backlog, or, better still, piled up in a pyramid between the handchunks;
a few strips of birch-bark; and one good match,--these are
all that you want. But be sure that your match is a good one. It
is better to see to this before you go into the brush. Your
comfort, even your life, may depend on it.
"AVEC CES ALLUMETTES-LA," said my guide at LAC ST. JEAN one day, as
he vainly tried to light his pipe with a box of parlour matches from
the hotel,--AVEC CES GNOGNOTTES DíALLUMETTES ON POURRA MOURIR AU
BOIS!"
In the woods, the old-fashioned brimstone match of our grandfathers--
the match with a brown head and a stout stick and a dreadful smell--
is the best. But if you have only one, do not trust even that to
light your fire directly. Use it first to touch off a roll of
birch-bark which you hold in your hand. Then, when the bark is well
alight, crinkling and curling, push it under the heap of kindlings,
give the flame time to take a good hold, and lay your wood over it,
a stick at a time, until the whole pile is blazing. Now your fire
is started. Your friendly little red-haired gnome is ready to serve
you through the night.
He will dry your clothes if you are wet. He will cheer you up if
you are despondent. He will diffuse an air of sociability through
the camp, and draw the men together in a half circle for
storytelling and jokes and singing. He will hold a flambeau for you
while you spread your blankets on the boughs and dress for bed. He
will keep you warm while you sleep,--at least till about three
oíclock in the morning, when you dream that you are out sleighing in
your pajamas, and wake up with a shiver.
"HOLA, FERDINAND, FRANCOIS!" you call out from your bed, pulling the
blankets over your ears; "RAMANCHEZ LE FEU, SíIL VOUS PLAIT. CíEST
UN FREITE DE CHIEN."
III
THE COOKING-FIRE
Of course such a fire as I have been describing can be used for
cooking, when it has burned down a little, and there is a bed of hot
embers in front of the backlog. But a correct kitchen fire should
be constructed after another fashion. What you want now is not
blaze, but heat, and that not diffused, but concentrated. You must
be able to get close to your fire without burning your boots or
scorching your face.
If you have time and the material, make a fireplace of big stones.
But not of granite, for that will split with the heat, and perhaps
fly in your face.
If you are in a hurry and there are no suitable stones at hand, lay
two good logs nearly parallel with each other, a foot or so apart,
and build your fire between them. For a cooking-fire, use split
wood in short sticks. Let the first supply burn to glowing coals
before you begin. A frying-pan that is lukewarm one minute and redhot
the next is the abomination of desolation. If you want black
toast, have it made before a fresh, sputtering, blazing heap of
wood.
In fires, as in men, an excess of energy is a lack of usefulness.
The best work is done without many sparks. Just enough is the right
kind of a fire and a feast.
To know how to cook is not a very elegant accomplishment. Yet there
are times and seasons when it seems to come in better than
familiarity with the dead languages, or much skill upon the lute.
You cannot always rely on your guides for a tasteful preparation of
food. Many of them are ignorant of the difference between frying
and broiling, and their notion of boiling a potato or a fish is to
reduce it to a pulp. Now and then you find a man who has a natural
inclination to the culinary art, and who does very well within
familiar limits.
Old Edouard, the Montaignais Indian who cooked for my friends H. E.
G. and C. S. D. last summer on the STE. MARGUERITE EN BAS, was such
a man. But Edouard could not read, and the only way he could tell
the nature of the canned provisions was by the pictures on the cans.
If the picture was strange to him, there was no guessing what he
would do with the contents of the can. He was capable of roasting
strawberries, and serving green peas cold for dessert. One day a
can of mullagatawny soup and a can of apricots were handed out to
him simultaneously and without explanations. Edouard solved the
problem by opening both cans and cooking them together. We had a
new soup that day, MULLAGATAWNY AUX APRICOTS. It was not as bad as
it sounds. It tasted somewhat like chutney.
The real reason why food that is cooked over an open fire tastes so
good to us is because we are really hungry when we get it. The man
who puts up provisions for camp has a great advantage over the
dealers who must satisfy the pampered appetite of people in houses.
I never can get any bacon in New York like that which I buy at a
little shop in Quebec to take into the woods. If I ever set up in
the grocery business, I shall try to get a good trade among anglers.
It will be easy to please my customers.
The reputation that trout enjoy as a food-fish is partly due to the
fact that they are usually cooked over an open fire. In the city
they never taste as good. It is not merely a difference in
freshness. It is a change in the sauce. If the truth must be told,
even by an angler, there are at least five salt-water fish which are
better than trout,--to eat. There is none better to catch.
IV
THE SMUDGE-FIRE
But enough of the cooking-fire. Let us turn now to the subject of
the smudge, known in Lower Canada as LA BOUCANE. The smudge owes
its existence to the pungent mosquito, the sanguinary black-fly, and
the peppery midge,--LE MARINGOUIN, LA MOUSTIQUE, ET LE BRULOT. To
what it owes its English name I do not know; but its French name
means simply a thick, nauseating, intolerable smoke.
The smudge is called into being for the express purpose of creating
a smoke of this kind, which is as disagreeable to the mosquito, the
black-fly, and the midge as it is to the man whom they are
devouring. But the man survives the smoke, while the insects
succumb to it, being destroyed or driven away. Therefore the
smudge, dark and bitter in itself, frequently becomes, like
adversity, sweet in its uses. It must be regarded as a form of fire
with which man has made friends under the pressure of a cruel
necessity.
It would seem as if it ought to be the simplest affair in the world
to light up a smudge. And so it is--if you are not trying.
An attempt to produce almost any other kind of a fire will bring
forth smoke abundantly. But when you deliberately undertake to
create a smudge, flames break from the wettest timber, and green
moss blazes with a furious heat. You hastily gather handfuls of
seemingly incombustible material and throw it on the fire, but the
conflagration increases. Grass and green leaves hesitate for an
instant and then flash up like tinder. The more you put on, the
more your smudge rebels against its proper task of smudging. It
makes a pleasant warmth, to encourage the black-flies; and bright
light to attract and cheer the mosquitoes. Your effort is a
brilliant failure.
The proper way to make a smudge is this. Begin with a very little,
lowly fire. Let it be bright, but not ambitious. Donít try to make
a smoke yet.
Then gather a good supply of stuff which seems likely to suppress
fire without smothering it. Moss of a certain kind will do, but not
the soft, feathery moss that grows so deep among the spruce-trees.
Half-decayed wood is good; spongy, moist, unpleasant stuff, a
vegetable wet blanket. The bark of dead evergreen trees, hemlock,
spruce, or balsam, is better still. Gather a plentiful store of it.
But donít try to make a smoke yet.
Let your fire burn a while longer; cheer it up a little. Get some
clear, resolute, unquenchable coals aglow in the heart of it. Donít
try to make a smoke yet.
Now pile on your smouldering fuel. Fan it with your hat. Kneel
down and blow it, and in ten minutes you will have a smoke that will
make you wish you had never been born.
That is the proper way to make a smudge. But the easiest way is to
ask your guide to make it for you.
If he makes it in an old iron pot, so much the better, for then you
can move it around to the windward when the breeze veers, and carry
it into your tent without risk of setting everything on fire, and
even take it with you in the canoe while you are fishing.
Some of the pleasantest pictures in the anglerís gallery of
remembrance are framed in the smoke that rises from a smudge.
With my eyes shut, I can call up a vision of eight birch-bark canoes
floating side by side on Moosehead Lake, on a fair June morning,
fifteen years ago. They are anchored off Green Island, riding
easily on the long, gentle waves. In the stern of each canoe there
is a guide with a long-handled net; in the bow, an angler with a
light fly-rod; in the middle, a smudge-kettle, smoking steadily. In
the air to the windward of the little fleet hovers a swarm of flies
drifting down on the shore breeze, with bloody purpose in their
breasts, but baffled by the protecting smoke. In the water to the
leeward plays a school of speckled trout, feeding on the minnows
that hang around the sunken ledges of rock. As a larger wave than
usual passes over the ledges, it lifts the fish up, and you can see
the big fellows, three, and four, and even five pounds apiece,
poising themselves in the clear brown water. A long cast will send
the fly over one of them. Let it sink a foot. Draw it up with a
fluttering motion. Now the fish sees it, and turns to catch it.
There is a yellow gleam in the depth, a sudden swirl on the surface;
you strike sharply, and the trout is matching his strength against
the spring of your four ounces of split bamboo.
You can guess at his size, as he breaks water, by the breadth of his
tail: a pound of weight to an inch of tail,--that is the traditional
measure, and it usually comes pretty close to the mark, at least in
the case of large fish. But it is never safe to record the weight
until the trout is in the canoe. As the Canadian hunters say, "Sell
not the skin of the bear while he carries it."
Now the breeze that blows over Green Island drops away, and the
smoke of the eight smudge-kettles falls like a thick curtain. The
canoes, the dark shores of Norcross Point, the twin peaks of Spencer
Mountain, the dim blue summit of Katahdin, the dazzling sapphire
sky, the flocks of fleece-white clouds shepherded on high by the
western wind, all have vanished. With closed eyes I see another
vision, still framed in smoke,--a vision of yesterday.
It is a wild river flowing into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, on the
COTE NORD, far down towards Labrador. There is a long, narrow,
swift pool between two parallel ridges of rock. Over the ridge on
the right pours a cataract of pale yellow foam. At the bottom of
the pool, the water slides down into a furious rapid, and dashes
straight through an impassable gorge half a mile to the sea. The
pool is full of salmon, leaping merrily in their delight at coming
into their native stream. The air is full of black-flies, rejoicing
in the warmth of the July sun. On a slippery point of rock, below
the fall, are two anglers, tempting the fish and enduring the flies.
Behind them is an old HABITANT raising a mighty column of smoke.
Through the cloudy pillar which keeps back the Egyptian host, you
see the waving of a long rod. A silver-gray fly with a barbed tail
darts out across the pool, swings around with the current, well
under water, and slowly works past the big rock in the centre, just
at the head of the rapid. Almost past it, but not quite: for
suddenly the fly disappears; the line begins to run out; the reel
sings sharp and shrill; a salmon is hooked.
But how well is he hooked? That is the question. This is no easy
pool to play a fish in. There is no chance to jump into a canoe and
drop below him, and get the current to help you in drowning him.
You cannot follow him along the shore. You cannot even lead him
into quiet water, where the gaffer can creep near to him unseen and
drag him in with a quick stroke. You must fight your fish to a
finish, and all the advantages are on his side. The current is
terribly strong. If he makes up his mind to go downstream to the
sea, the only thing you can do is to hold him by main force; and
then it is ten to one that the hook tears out or the leader breaks.
It is not in human nature for one man to watch another handling a
fish in such a place without giving advice. "Keep the tip of your
rod up. Donít let your reel overrun. Stir him up a little, he ës
sulking. Donít let him ëjig,í or youëll lose him. You ëre playing
him too hard. There, he ës going to jump again. Drop your tip.
Stop him, quick! he ës going down the rapid!"
Of course the man who is playing the salmon does not like this. If
he is quick-tempered, sooner or later he tells his counsellor to
shut up. But if he is a gentle, early-Christian kind of a man, wise
as a serpent and harmless as a dove, he follows the advice that is
given to him, promptly and exactly. Then, when it is all ended, and
he has seen the big fish, with the line over his shoulder, poised
for an instant on the crest of the first billow of the rapid, and
has felt the leader stretch and give and SNAP!--then he can have the
satisfaction, while he reels in his slack line, of saying to his
friend, "Well, old man, I did everything just as you told me. But I
think if I had pushed that fish a little harder at the beginning, AS
I WANTED TO, I might have saved him."
But really, of course, the chances were all against it. In such a
pool, most of the larger fish get away. Their weight gives them a
tremendous pull. The fish that are stopped from going into the
rapid, and dragged back from the curling wave, are usually the
smaller ones. Here they are,--twelve pounds, eight pounds, six
pounds, five pounds and a half, FOUR POUNDS! Is not this the
smallest salmon that you ever saw? Not a grilse, you understand,
but a real salmon, of brightest silver, hall-marked with St.
Andrewís cross.
Now let us sit down for a moment and watch the fish trying to leap
up the falls. There is a clear jump of about ten feet, and above
that an apparently impossible climb of ten feet more up a ladder of
twisting foam. A salmon darts from the boiling water at the bottom
of the fall like an arrow from a bow. He rises in a beautiful
curve, fins laid close to his body and tail quivering; but he has
miscalculated his distance. He is on the downward curve when the
water strikes him and tumbles him back. A bold little fish, not
more than eighteen inches long, makes a jump at the side of the
fall, where the water is thin, and is rolled over and over in the
spray. A larger salmon rises close beside us with a tremendous
rush, bumps his nose against a jutting rock, and flops back into the
pool. Now comes a fish who has made his calculations exactly. He
leaves the pool about eight feet from the foot of the fall, rises
swiftly, spreads his fins, and curves his tail as if he were flying,
strikes the water where it is thickest just below the brink, holds
on desperately, and drives himself, with one last wriggle, through
the bending stream, over the edge, and up the first step of the
foaming stairway. He has obeyed the strongest instinct of his
nature, and gone up to make love in the highest fresh water that he
can reach.
The smoke of the smudge-fire is sharp and tearful, but a man can
learn to endure a good deal of it when he can look through its rings
at such scenes as these.
V
THE LITTLE FRIENDSHIP-FIRE
There are times and seasons when the angler has no need of any of
the three fires of which we have been talking. He sleeps in a
house. His breakfast and dinner are cooked for him in a kitchen.
He is in no great danger from black-flies or mosquitoes. All he
needs now, as he sets out to spend a day on the Neversink, or the
Willowemoc, or the Shepaug, or the Swiftwater, is a good lunch in
his pocket, and a little friendship-fire to burn pleasantly beside
him while he eats his frugal fare and prolongs his noonday rest.
This form of fire does less work than any other in the world. Yet
it is far from being useless; and I, for one, should be sorry to
live without it. Its only use is to make a visible centre of
interest where there are two or three anglers eating their lunch
together, or to supply a kind of companionship to a lone fisherman.
It is kindled and burns for no other purpose than to give you the
sense of being at home and at ease. Why the fire should do this, I
cannot tell, but it does.
You may build your friendship-fire in almost any way that pleases
you; but this is the way in which you shall build it best. You have
no axe, of course, so you must look about for the driest sticks that
you can find. Do not seek them close beside the stream, for there
they are likely to be water-soaked; but go back into the woods a bit
and gather a good armful of fuel. Then break it, if you can, into
lengths of about two feet, and construct your fire in the following
fashion.
Lay two sticks parallel, and put between them a pile of dried grass,
dead leaves, small twigs, and the paper in which your lunch was
wrapped. Then lay two other sticks crosswise on top of your first
pair. Strike your match and touch your kindlings. As the fire
catches, lay on other pairs of sticks, each pair crosswise to the
pair that is below it, until you have a pyramid of flame. This is
"a Micmac fire" such as the Indians make in the woods.
Now you can pull off your wading-boots and warm your feet at the
blaze. You can toast your bread if you like. You can even make
shift to broil one of your trout, fastened on the end of a birch
twig if you have a fancy that way. When your hunger is satisfied,
you shake out the crumbs for the birds and the squirrels, pick up a
stick with a coal at the end to light your pipe, put some more wood
on your fire, and settle down for an hourís reading if you have a
book in your pocket, or for a good talk if you have a comrade with
you.
The stream of time flows swift and smooth, by such a fire as this.
The moments slip past unheeded; the sun sinks down his western arch;
the shadows begin to fall across the brook; it is time to move on
for the afternoon fishing. The fire has almost burned out. But do
not trust it too much. Throw some sand over it, or bring a hatful
of water from the brook to pour on it, until you are sure that the
last glowing ember is extinguished, and nothing but the black coals
and the charred ends of the sticks are left.
Even the little friendship-fire must keep the law of the bush. All
lights out when their purpose is fulfilled!
VI
ALTARS OF REMEMBRANCE
It is a question that we have often debated, in the informal
meetings of our Petrine Club: Which is pleasanter,--to fish an old
stream, or a new one?
The younger members are all for the "fresh woods and pastures new."
They speak of the delight of turning off from the high-road into
some faintly-marked trail; following it blindly through the forest,
not knowing how far you have to go; hearing the voice of waters
sounding through the woodland; leaving the path impatiently and
striking straight across the underbrush; scrambling down a steep
bank, pushing through a thicket of alders, and coming out suddenly,
face to face with a beautiful, strange brook. It reminds you, of
course, of some old friend. It is a little like the Beaverkill, or
the Ausable, or the Gale River. And yet it is different. Every
stream has its own character and disposition. Your new acquaintance
invites you to a day of discoveries. If the water is high, you will
follow it down, and have easy fishing. If the water is low, you
will go upstream, and fish "fine and far-off." Every turn in the
avenue which the little river has made for you opens up a new view,--
a rocky gorge where the deep pools are divided by white-footed
falls; a lofty forest where the shadows are deep and the trees arch
overhead; a flat, sunny stretch where the stream is spread out, and
pebbly islands divide the channels, and the big fish are lurking at
the sides in the sheltered corners under the bushes. From scene to
scene you follow on, delighted and expectant, until the night
suddenly drops its veil, and then you will be lucky if you can find
your way home in the dark!
Yes, it is all very good, this exploration of new streams. But, for
my part, I like still better to go back to a familiar little river,
and fish or dream along the banks where I have dreamed and fished
before. I know every bend and curve: the sharp turn where the water
runs under the roots of the old hemlock-tree; the snaky glen, where
the alders stretch their arms far out across the stream; the meadow
reach, where the trout are fat and silvery, and will only rise about
sunrise or sundown, unless the day is cloudy; the Naiadís Elbow,
where the brook rounds itself, smooth and dimpled, to embrace a
cluster of pink laurel-bushes. All these I know; yes, and almost
every current and eddy and backwater I know long before I come to
it. I remember where I caught the big trout the first year I came
to the stream; and where I lost a bigger one. I remember the pool
where there were plenty of good fish last year, and wonder whether
they are there now.
Better things than these I remember: the companions with whom I have
followed the stream in days long past; the rendezvous with a comrade
at the place where the rustic bridge crosses the brook; the hours of
sweet converse beside the friendship-fire; the meeting at twilight
with my lady Graygown and the children, who have come down by the
wood-road to walk home with me.
Surely it is pleasant to follow an old stream. Flowers grow along
its banks which are not to be found anywhere else in the wide world.
"There is rosemary, that ës for remembrance; and there is pansies,
that ës for thoughts!"
One May evening, a couple of years since, I was angling in the
Swiftwater, and came upon Joseph Jefferson, stretched out on a large
rock in midstream, and casting the fly down a long pool. He had
passed the threescore years and ten, but he was as eager and as
happy as a boy in his fishing.
"You here!" I cried. "What good fortune brought you into these
waters?"
"Ah," he answered, "I fished this brook forty-five years ago. It
was in the Paradise Valley that I first thought of Rip Van Winkle.
I wanted to come back again for the sake of old times."
But what has all this to do with an open fire? I will tell you. It
is at the places along the stream, where the little flames of love
and friendship have been kindled in bygone days, that the past
returns most vividly. These are the altars of remembrance.
It is strange how long a small fire will leave its mark. The
charred sticks, the black coals, do not decay easily. If they lie
well up the hank, out of reach of the spring floods, they will stay
there for years. If you have chanced to build a rough fireplace of
stones from the brook, it seems almost as if it would last forever.
There is a mossy knoll beneath a great butternut-tree on the
Swiftwater where such a fireplace was built four years ago; and
whenever I come to that place now I lay the rod aside, and sit down
for a little while by the fast-flowing water, and remember.
This is what I see: A man wading up the stream, with a creel over
his shoulder, and perhaps a dozen trout in it; two little lads in
gray corduroys running down the path through the woods to meet him,
one carrying a frying-pan and a kettle, the other with a basket of
lunch on his arm. Then I see the bright flames leaping up in the
fireplace, and hear the trout sizzling in the pan, and smell the
appetizing odour. Now I see the lads coming back across the footbridge
that spans the stream, with a bottle of milk from the nearest
farmhouse. They are laughing and teetering as they balance along
the single plank. Now the table is spread on the moss. How good
the lunch tastes! Never were there such pink-fleshed trout, such
crisp and savoury slices of broiled bacon. Douglas, (the beloved
doll that the younger lad shamefacedly brings out from the pocket of
his jacket,) must certainly have some of it. And after the lunch is
finished, and the birdís portion has been scattered on the moss, we
creep carefully on our hands and knees to the edge of the brook, and
look over the bank at the big trout that is poising himself in the
amber water. We have tried a dozen times to catch him, but never
succeeded. The next time, perhaps--
Well, the fireplace is still standing. The butternut-tree spreads
its broad branches above the stream. The violets and the bishopíscaps
and the wild anemones are sprinkled over the banks. The
yellow-throat and the water-thrush and the vireos still sing the
same tunes in the thicket. And the elder of the two lads often
comes back with me to that pleasant place and shares my fishermanís
luck beside the Swiftwater.
But the younger lad?
Ah, my little Barney, you have gone to follow a new stream,--clear
as crystal,--flowing through fields of wonderful flowers that never
fade. It is a strange river to Teddy and me; strange and very far
away. Some day we shall see it with you; and you will teach us the
names of those blossoms that do not wither. But till then, little
Barney, the other lad and I will follow the old stream that flows by
the woodland fireplace,--your altar.
Rue grows here. Yes, there is plenty of rue. But there is also
rosemary, that ës for remembrance! And close beside it I see a
little heartís-ease.
A SLUMBER SONG
FOR THE FISHERMAN'S CHILD
Furl your sail, my little boatie;
Here ës the haven, still and deep,
Where the dreaming tides, in-streaming,
Up the channel creep.
See, the sunset breeze is dying;
Hark, the plover, landward flying,
Softly down the twilight crying;
Come to anchor, little boatie,
In the port of Sleep.
Far away, my little boatie,
Roaring waves are white with foam;
Ships are striving, onward driving,
Day and night they roam.
Father ës at the deep-sea trawling,
In the darkness, rowing, hauling,
While the hungry winds are calling,--
God protect him, little boatie,
Bring him safely home!
Not for you, my little boatie,
Is the wide and weary sea;
You ëre too slender, and too tender,
You must rest with me.
All day long you have been straying
Up and down the shore and playing;
Come to port, make no delaying!
Day is over, little boatie,
Night falls suddenly.
Furl your sail, my little boatie;
Fold your wings, my tired dove.
Dews are sprinkling, stars are twinkling
Drowsily above.
Cease from sailing, cease from rowing;
Rock upon the dream-tide, knowing
Safely oíer your rest are glowing,
All the night, my little boatie,
Harbour-lights of love.