inting
had never been invented, day after day, week after week, month after
month, in mute, deep, earnest, passionate, heart-mind-and-soul-engrossing
hope of some time or other catching a minnow or a beardie! A tug--a tug!
With face ten times flushed and pale by turns ere you could count ten,
he at last has strength, in the agitation of his fear and joy, to pull
away at the monster--and there he lies in his beauty among the gowans
and the greensward, for he has whapped him right over his head and far
away, a fish a quarter of an ounce in weight, and, at the very least,
two inches long! Off he flies, on wings of wind, to his father, mother,
and sisters, and brothers, and cousins, and all the neighbourhood,
holding the fish aloft in both hands, still fearful of its escape, and,
like a genuine child of corruption, his eyes brighten at the first blush
of cold blood on his small fumy fingers. He carries about with him,
up-stairs and down-stairs, his prey upon a plate; he will not wash his
hands before dinner, for he exults in the silver scales adhering to the
thumb-nail that scooped the pin out of the baggy's maw--and at night,
"cabined, cribbed, confined," he is overheard murmuring in his sleep--a
thief, a robber, and a murderer, in his yet infant dreams!

From that hour Angling is no more a mere delightful daydream, haunted by
the dim hopes of imaginary minnows, but a reality--an art--a science--of
which the flaxen-headed schoolboy feels himself to be master--a mystery
in which he has been initiated; and off he goes now, all alone, in the
power of successful passion, to the distant brook--brook a mile
off--with fields, and hedges, and single trees, and little groves, and a
huge forest of six acres, between and the house in which he is boarded
or was born! There flows on the slender music of the shadowy
shallows--there pours the deeper din of the birch-tree'd waterfall. The
scared water-pyet flits away from stone to stone, and dipping,
disappears among the airy bubbles, to him a new sight of joy and wonder.
And oh! how sweet the scent of the broom or furze, yellowing along the
braes, where leap the lambs, less happy than he, on the knolls of
sunshine! His grandfather has given him a half-crown rod in two
pieces--yes, his line is of hair twisted--plaited by his own
soon-instructed little fingers. By Heavens, he is fishing with the fly!
And the Fates, grim and grisly as they are painted to be by full-grown,
ungrateful, lying