This was his observation. His honor made a great discovery in
bailments.
I can just remember an old brown-coated man who was the Walton of
this stream, who had come over from Newcastle, England, with his
son, - the latter a stout and hearty man who had lifted an anchor
in his day. A straight old man he was who took his way in silence
through the meadows, having passed the period of communication
with his fellows; his old experienced coat, hanging long and
straight and brown as the yellow-pine bark, glittering with so
much smothered sunlight, if you stood near enough, no work of art
but naturalized at length. I often discovered him unexpectedly
amid the pads and the gray willows when he moved, fishing in some
old country method, - for youth and age then went a fishing
together, - full of incommunicable thoughts, perchance about his
own Tyne and Northumberland. 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. The natural
historian is not a fisherman, who prays for cloudy days and good
luck merely, but as fishing has been styled "a contemplative
man's recreation," introducing him profitably to woods and water,
so the fruit of the naturalist's observations is not in new
genera or species, but in new contemplations still, and science
is only a more contemplative man's recreation.
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