Fisherman's Luck And Some Other Uncertain Things Part 9

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 t.i.tles 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. FISH-TAILS 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 ent.i.tles 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 Ba.s.s; 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 n.o.bLE 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 pa.s.sage 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 landing-net, my plummet, and the gorgeous jury of flies which I had a.s.sembled 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 superst.i.tion 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 sh.o.r.e? 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 cla.s.s 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 ill-humour, 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sion 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-gla.s.ses, 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 lat.i.tude, 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 rosemary-fields 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 st.u.r.dy, 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 sh.o.r.es 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.