d very
independently on his pension and some other small annual sums,
amounting in all to about L 40. His great hobby, and indeed the
business of his life, was to angle. I found he had read Isaac
Walton very attentively; he seemed to have imbibed all his
simplicity of heart, contentment of mind, and fluency of tongue.
We kept company with him almost the whole day, wandering along the
beautiful banks of the river, admiring the ease and elegant
dexterity with which the old fellow managed his angle, throwing the
fly with unerring certainty at a great distance and among
overhanging bushes, and waving it gracefully in the air, to keep it
from entangling, as he stumped with his staff and wooden leg from
one bend of the river to another. He kept up a continual flow of
cheerful and entertaining talk, 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 wa