the true angler's armory. Thus harnessed for the field, he
was as great a matter of stare and wonderment among the coun-
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 first 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 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-humor, come 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 meadow land, among the
mountains; where the quiet was only interrupted by the oc-
casional tinkling of a bell from the lazy cattle among the
clover, or the sound of a wood-cutter's axe from the neighbor-
ing 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;

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