Some Men Are
Judges These August Days, Sitting On Benches, Even Till The Court
Rises; They Sit Judging There Honorably,
Between the seasons and
between meals, leading a civil politic life, arbitrating in the
case of Spaulding _versus_ Cummings, it
May be, from highest noon
till the red vesper sinks into the west. The fisherman,
meanwhile, stands in three feet of water, under the same summer's
sun, arbitrating in other cases between muckworm and shiner, amid
the fragrance of water-lilies, mint, and pontederia, leading his
life many rods from the dry land, within a pole's length of where
the larger fishes swim. Human life is to him very much like a
river,
"renning aie downward to the sea."
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.
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