alk, and what I particularly liked him
for was, that though we tried every way to entrap him into some
abuse of America and its inhabitants, there was no getting him to
utter an ill-natured word concerning us. His whole conversation and
deportment illustrated old Isaac's maxims as to the benign
influence of angling over the human heart.... I ought to mention
that he had two companions--one, a ragged, picturesque varlet, that
had all the air of a veteran poacher, and I warrant would find any
fish-pond in the neighborhood in the darkest night; the other was a
disciple of the old philosopher, studying the art under him, and
was son and heir apparent to the landlady of the village tavern."

A contrast to this pleasing picture is afforded by some character
sketches at the little watering-place of Buxton, which our kindly
observer visited the same year.

"At the hotel where we put up [he writes] we had a most singular
and whimsical assemblage of beings. I don't know whether you were
ever at an English watering-place, but if you have not been, you
have missed the best opportunity of studying English oddities, both
moral and physical. I no longer wonder at the English being such
excellent caricaturists, they have such an inexhaustible number and
variety of subjects to study from. The only care should be not to
follow fact too closely, for I'll swear I have met with characters
and figures that would be condemned as extravagant, if faithfully
delineated by pen or pencil. At a watering-place like Buxton, where
people really resort for health, you see the great tendency of the
English to run into excrescences and bloat out into grotesque
deformities. As to noses, I say nothing of them, though we had
every variety: some snubbed and turned up, with distended nostrils,
like a dormer window on the roof of a house; others convex and
twisted like a buck-handled knife; and others magnificently
efflorescent, like a full-blown cauliflower. But as to the persons
that were attached to these noses, fancy any distortion,
protuberance, and fungous embellishment that can be produced in the
human form by high and gross feeding, by the bloating operations of
malt liquors, and by the rheumy influence of a damp, foggy,
vaporous climate. One old fellow was an exception to this, for
instea