Little Rivers [12]
a
whole continent of newly discovered poetry within him, and
worshipped his Columbus disguised in curls. Your boy is your true
idealist, after all, although (or perhaps because) he is still
uncivilised.
II.
The arrival of the rod, in four joints, with an extra tip, a brass
reel, and the other luxuries for which a true angler would
willingly exchange the necessaries of life, marked a new epoch in
the boy's career. At the uplifting of that wand, as if it had been
in the hand of another Moses, the waters of infancy rolled back,
and the way was opened into the promised land, whither the tyrant
nurses, with all their proud array of baby-chariots, could not
follow. The way was open, but not by any means dry. One of the
first events in the dispensation of the rod was the purchase of a
pair of high rubber boots. Inserted in this armour of modern
infantry, and transfigured with delight, the boy clumped through
all the little rivers within a circuit of ten miles from Caldwell,
and began to learn by parental example the yet unmastered art of
complete angling.
But because some of the streams were deep and strong, and his legs
were short and slender, and his ambition was even taller than his
boots, the father would sometimes take him up pickaback, and wade
along carefully through the perilous places--which are often, in
this world, the very places one longs to fish in. So, in your
remembrance, you can see the little rubber boots sticking out under
the father's arms, and the rod projecting over his head, and the
bait dangling down unsteadily into the deep holes, and the
delighted boy hooking and playing and basketing his trout high in
the air. How many of our best catches in life are made from some
one else's shoulders!
From this summer the whole earth became to the boy, as Tennyson
describes the lotus country, "a land of streams." In school-days
and in town he acknowledged the sway of those mysterious and
irresistible forces which produce tops at one season, and marbles
at another, and kites at another, and bind all boyish hearts to
play mumble-the-peg at the due time more certainly than the stars
are bound to their orbits. But when vacation came, with its annual
exodus from the city, there was only one sign in the zodiac, and
that was Pisces.
No country seemed to him tolerable without trout, and no landscape
beautiful unless enlivened by a young river. Among what delectable
mountains did those watery guides lead his vagrant steps, and with
what curious, mixed, and sometimes profitable company did they make
him familiar!
There was one exquisite stream among the Alleghanies, called
Lycoming Creek, beside which the family spent a summer in a
decadent inn, kept by a tremulous landlord who was always sitting
on the steps of the porch, and whose most memorable remark was that
he had "a misery in his stomach." This form of speech amused the
boy, but he did not in the least comprehend it. It was the
description of an unimaginable experience in a region which was as
yet known to him only as the seat of pleasure. He did not
understand how any one could be miserable when he could catch trout
from his own dooryard.
The big creek, with its sharp turns from side to side of the
valley, its hemlock-shaded falls in the gorge, and its long, still
reaches in the "sugar-bottom," where the maple-trees grew as if in
an orchard, and the superfluity of grasshoppers made the trout fat
and dainty, was too wide to fit the boy. But nature keeps all
sizes in her stock, and a smaller stream, called Rocky Run, came
tumbling down opposite the inn, as if made to order for juvenile
use.
How well you can follow it, through the old pasture overgrown with
alders, and up past the broken-down mill-dam and the crumbling
sluice, into the mountain-cleft from which it leaps laughing! The
water, except just after a rain-storm,
whole continent of newly discovered poetry within him, and
worshipped his Columbus disguised in curls. Your boy is your true
idealist, after all, although (or perhaps because) he is still
uncivilised.
II.
The arrival of the rod, in four joints, with an extra tip, a brass
reel, and the other luxuries for which a true angler would
willingly exchange the necessaries of life, marked a new epoch in
the boy's career. At the uplifting of that wand, as if it had been
in the hand of another Moses, the waters of infancy rolled back,
and the way was opened into the promised land, whither the tyrant
nurses, with all their proud array of baby-chariots, could not
follow. The way was open, but not by any means dry. One of the
first events in the dispensation of the rod was the purchase of a
pair of high rubber boots. Inserted in this armour of modern
infantry, and transfigured with delight, the boy clumped through
all the little rivers within a circuit of ten miles from Caldwell,
and began to learn by parental example the yet unmastered art of
complete angling.
But because some of the streams were deep and strong, and his legs
were short and slender, and his ambition was even taller than his
boots, the father would sometimes take him up pickaback, and wade
along carefully through the perilous places--which are often, in
this world, the very places one longs to fish in. So, in your
remembrance, you can see the little rubber boots sticking out under
the father's arms, and the rod projecting over his head, and the
bait dangling down unsteadily into the deep holes, and the
delighted boy hooking and playing and basketing his trout high in
the air. How many of our best catches in life are made from some
one else's shoulders!
From this summer the whole earth became to the boy, as Tennyson
describes the lotus country, "a land of streams." In school-days
and in town he acknowledged the sway of those mysterious and
irresistible forces which produce tops at one season, and marbles
at another, and kites at another, and bind all boyish hearts to
play mumble-the-peg at the due time more certainly than the stars
are bound to their orbits. But when vacation came, with its annual
exodus from the city, there was only one sign in the zodiac, and
that was Pisces.
No country seemed to him tolerable without trout, and no landscape
beautiful unless enlivened by a young river. Among what delectable
mountains did those watery guides lead his vagrant steps, and with
what curious, mixed, and sometimes profitable company did they make
him familiar!
There was one exquisite stream among the Alleghanies, called
Lycoming Creek, beside which the family spent a summer in a
decadent inn, kept by a tremulous landlord who was always sitting
on the steps of the porch, and whose most memorable remark was that
he had "a misery in his stomach." This form of speech amused the
boy, but he did not in the least comprehend it. It was the
description of an unimaginable experience in a region which was as
yet known to him only as the seat of pleasure. He did not
understand how any one could be miserable when he could catch trout
from his own dooryard.
The big creek, with its sharp turns from side to side of the
valley, its hemlock-shaded falls in the gorge, and its long, still
reaches in the "sugar-bottom," where the maple-trees grew as if in
an orchard, and the superfluity of grasshoppers made the trout fat
and dainty, was too wide to fit the boy. But nature keeps all
sizes in her stock, and a smaller stream, called Rocky Run, came
tumbling down opposite the inn, as if made to order for juvenile
use.
How well you can follow it, through the old pasture overgrown with
alders, and up past the broken-down mill-dam and the crumbling
sluice, into the mountain-cleft from which it leaps laughing! The
water, except just after a rain-storm,