He Was Always To Be Seen In Serene
Afternoons Haunting The River, And Almost Rustling With The
Sedge; So Many
Sunny hours in an old man's life, entrapping silly
fish; almost grown to be the sun's familiar; what need had
He of
hat or raiment any, having served out his time, and seen through
such thin disguises? I have seen how his coeval fates rewarded
him with the yellow perch, and yet I thought his luck was not in
proportion to his years; and I have seen when, with slow steps
and weighed down with aged thoughts, he disappeared with his fish
under his low-roofed house on the skirts of the village. I think
nobody else saw him; nobody else remembers him now, for he soon
after died, and migrated to new Tyne streams. His fishing was
not a sport, nor solely a means of subsistence, but a sort of
solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world, just as the aged
read their Bibles.
Whether we live by the seaside, or by the lakes and rivers, or on
the prairie, it concerns us to attend to the nature of fishes,
since they are not phenomena confined to certain localities only,
but forms and phases of the life in nature universally dispersed.
The countless shoals which annually coast the shores of Europe
and America are not so interesting to the student of nature, as
the more fertile law itself, which deposits their spawn on the
tops of mountains, and on the interior plains; the fish principle
in nature, from which it results that they may be found in water
in so many places, in greater or less numbers.
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