cheerful
endurance, which the old man himself seemed to have learned,
strangely enough, from the very sport so often called cruel and
murderous. Incomprehensible as it may seem, to his simple
intellect the fisherman's art was a whole system of morality, a
guide for every-day life, an education, a gospel. It was all any
poor mortal man, woman, or child, needed in this world to make him
or her happy, useful, good.

At first we scarcely realized this, and wondered greatly at certain
things he said, and the tone in which he said them. I remember at
that first meeting I asked him, rather carelessly, "Do you like
fishing?" He did not reply at first; then he looked at me with
those odd, limpid, green-gray eyes of his which always seemed to
reflect the clear waters of mountain streams, and said very
quietly: "You would n't ask me if I liked my mother--or my wife."
And he always spoke of his pursuit as one speaks of something very
dear, very sacred. Part of his story I learned from others, but
most of it from himself, bit by bit, as we wandered together day by
day in that lovely hill-country. As I tell it over again I seem to
hear the rush of mountain streams, the "sound of a going in the
tops of the trees," the sweet, pensive strain of white-throat
sparrow, and the plash of leaping trout; to see the crystal-clear
waters pouring over granite rock, the wonderful purple light upon
the mountains, the flash and glint of darting fish, the tender
green of early summer in the north country.

Fishin' Jimmy's real name was James Whitcher. He was born in the
Franconia Valley of northern New Hampshire, and his whole life had
been passed there. He had always fished; he could not remember
when or how he learned the art. From the days when, a tiny,
bare-legged urchin in ragged frock, he had dropped his piece of
string with its bent pin at the end into the narrow, shallow
brooklet behind his father's house, through early boyhood's season
of roaming along Gale River, wading Black Brook, rowing a leaky
boat on Streeter or Mink Pond, through youth, through manhood, on
and on into old age, his life had apparently been one long day's
fishing--an angler's holiday. Had it been only that? He had not
cared for books, or school, and all efforts to tie him down to
study were unavailing. But he knew well the books of running
brooks. No dry botanical text-book or manual could have taught him
all he now knew of plants and flowers and trees.