poets, smile like angels upon the paidler in the
brook, winnowing the air with their wings into western breezes, while at
the very first throw the yellow trout forsakes his fastness beneath the
bog-wood, and with a lazy wallop, and then a sudden plunge, and then a
race like lightning, changes at once the child into the boy, and shoots
through his thrilling and aching heart the ecstasy of a new life
expanding in that glorious pastime, even as a rainbow on a sudden
brightens up the sky. _Fortuna favet fortibus_--and with one long pull,
and strong pull, and pull altogether, Johnny lands a twelve-incher on
the soft, smooth, silvery sand of the only bay in all the burn where
such an exploit was possible, and dashing upon him like an osprey, soars
up with him in his talons to the bank, breaking his line as he hurries
off to a spot of safety twenty yards from the pool, and then flinging
him down on a heath-surrounded plat of sheep-nibbled verdure, lets him
bounce about till he is tired, and lies gasping with unfrequent and
feeble motions, bright and beautiful, and glorious with all his yellow
light and crimson lustre, spotted, speckled, and starred in his scaly
splendour, beneath a sun that never shone before so dazzlingly; but now
the radiance of the captive creature is dimmer and obscured, for the eye
of day winks and seems almost shut behind that slow-sailing mass of
clouds, composed in equal parts of air, rain, and sunshine.

Springs, summers, autumns, winters--each within itself longer, by many
times longer than the whole year of grown-up life, that slips at last
through one's fingers like a knotless thread--pass over the curled
darling's brow; and look at him now, a straight and strengthy stripling,
in the savage spirit of sport, springing over rock-ledge after
rock-ledge, nor needing aught as he plashes knee-deep, or
waistband-high, through river-feeding torrents, to the glorious music of
his running and ringing reel, after a tongue-hooked salmon, insanely
seeking with the ebb of tide, but all in vain, the white breakers of the
sea. No hazel or willow wand, no half-crown, rod of ash framed by
village wright, is now in his practised hands, of which the very left is
dexterous; but a twenty-feet rod of Phin's, all ring-rustling, and
a-glitter with the preserving varnish, limber as the attenuating line
itself, and lithe to its topmost tenuity as the elephant's
proboscis--the hiccory and the horn without twist, knot, or flaw-