.

For these shores very rarely form themselves into any picturesque
acclivity. Hardly is there on the whole course of the river one bold bluff
or headland to obstruct the sight; and the scenery might even be thought
tame and uninteresting, but for a home-born feeling that comes over the
kind heart as it approaches so close to the mowers on the meadow-field as
to scent the fragrance of the hay; to hear the song of the Boblink, or the
rhythmic whetting of the scythe; or passes the ends of those primitive,
those pilgrim-fences of post and rail, that enter the brink of the river
to mark the boundaries of the small, paternal, and though frequently
sterile, the much loved fields into which this home of industry is
divided.

The moment you have passed the fisherman, and the noise and movement of
the steamer have frightened the fish toward the shore, he darts out in his
boat with one end of a net of many roods in extent, takes a semi-circular
sweep and frequently draws in again with very little delay fraught with a
school of most luxurious Shad. It is of this fish that Basil Hall I think
says it is worth crossing the Atlantic to taste them; and although I fear
I may shock the prejudices of some of my friends who highly favour those
of the Delaware when caught above Bordentown, I cannot but opine that the
shad of the Connecticut is the best shad in the Union.

The opinion if incorrect may have arisen from the freshness with which I
have beheld them taken and have partaken of them from these nets, brought
without the least bruise or violence on board the steamer which lies
'blowing off' for a moment or two while it receives on the forward deck a
rich supply for breakfast of these broad thick-backed fellows, all wet and
spangling from the River, as stout at the dorsal fin as at the shoulder,
leaping hither and thither astonished at the suddenness of the change,
pausing at each instant to expand the deep pomegranate-coloured gills that
decorate their small and beautiful heads, and puffing on the deck as if
the air they inhaled could be nothing else but water; or else imagining
and planning an escape into their proper element; and at each exhalation
after a desperate leap, vying almost with the dolphin in the richness of
the hues of purple green and gold upon the laughing scales!

Now, one fine fish lies extended at its length, wondering and appalled and
tremulous with fear, as the cook's assistant, for the first time that any
h