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 meadowland 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 neighboring 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.
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