This day Dame Nature seemd in love,
The lusty sap began to move,
Fresh juice did stir th embrag vines,
And birds had drawn their valentines.
The jealous trout that low did lie,
Rose at a well-dissembled ?ie.
There stood my friend, with patient skill,
Attending of his trembling quill.
SIR H. WOTTON.
IT is said that many an unlucky ur is io run away from his family aake himself to a seafaring life from reading the history of Robinson Crusoe; and I suspect that, in like manner, many of those worthy gentlemen whiven to haunt the sides of pastoral streams with angle-rods in hand may trace the in of their passion to the seductive pages of ho Izaak Walton. I recollect studying his plete Angler several years sin pany with a knot of friends in America, and moreover that we were all pletely bitten with the angling mania. It was early in the year, but as soon as the weather icious, and that the spring began to melt into the verge of summer, we took rod in hand and sallied into the try, as stark mad as was ever Don Quixote from reading books of chivalry.
One of our party had equalled the Don in the fulness of his equipments, being attired cap-a-pie for the enterprise. He wore a broad-skirted fustian coat, perplexed with half a hundred pockets; a pair of stout shoes ahern gaiters; a basket slung on one side for ?sh; a patent rod, a landi, and a score of other inveniences only to be found irue anglers armory. Thus harnessed for the ?eld, he was as great a matter of stare and wonderment among the try folk, who had never seen a regular angler, as was the steel-clad hero of La Mancha among the goatherds of the Sierra Morena.
Our ?rst essay 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 ied 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 ?ll 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 balang 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 ited shade of a forest, ?lling 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 ?lling her home with uproar and ill-humor, e dimpling out of doors, swimming and curtseying and smiling upon all the world.
How smoothly would this vagrant brook glide at such times through some bosom of green meadowland 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 woodcutters axe from the neighb forest!
For my part, I was always a bu all kinds of sport that required either patience or adroitness, and had not angled above half an hour before I had pletely "satis?ed the se,"
and vinced myself of the truth of Izaak Waltons opinion, that angling is something like poetry--a man must be born to it. I hooked myself instead of the ?sh, tangled my line iree, lost my bait, broke my rod, until I gave up the attempt in despair, and passed the day uhe trees reading old Izaak, satis?ed that it was his fasating vein