, much pleasure in a day
on the stream, though they had no skill in the sport. Of this class was
Washington Irving, with an extract from whose SKETCH BOOK I will bring
this rambling dissertation to an end.

"Our first essay," says he, "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-humour, come dimpling out of doors, swimming and courtesying, 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 occasional tinkling of a bell from the lazy
cattle among the clover, or the sound of a woodcutter's axe from the
neighbouring 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; until I gave
up the attempt in despair, and passed the day under the trees, reading
old Izaak, satisfied that it was his fascinating vein of honest
simplicity and rural feeling that had bewitched me, and not the passion
for angling."

A NORWEGIAN HONEYMOON

"The best rose-bush, after all, is not that which has the
fewest thorns, but that which bears the finest roses."

--SOLOMON SINGLEWITZ: The Life of Adam.

I

It was not all unadulterated sweetness, of course. There were e