Exercise for its own sake he resolutely refused to take, and when my Alpine-enthusiast father dragged him up a Piz—the last bit with his eyes shut—he said: “I shall never climb anything again!”
But Seymour Hicks could tell a different tale of a memorable evening on which he hooked a big trout in the dusk—Joe teasing him as to its poor weight—and when they stayed so late beside a Scottish tarn to land it that their friends below came up the mountain with lanterns to the rescue.
In Peeblesshire, too, he had gay hours with a Captain Fearon, known to our children as Plum-bun, because of a rhyme with which he teased them.
This fine old sportsman—though he must have been sixty at the time—walked twenty miles after a day’s sport so as to let Joe have the only spare seat on a buggy that he might catch the night express to town for work on the morrow. I can see the tall handsome old man now on the moorside, gaily waving adieu to Joe with a champagne bottle which he had seized from the picnic basket to cheer him on the road.
Joe had many days with him on the Tweed; one of them, following such a big spate that an old countryman wading in front of them was never seen more after they had warned him against imprudently breasting the swirl of the water where the river made an abrupt bend ahead.
The gloom of this incident was partly mitigated by their being told that the man was a drunkard whose fate had often been so prophesied to him; but they fished no more in a spate on the Tweed.
Fun was oftener their portion. I fancy it was to Fearon that Joe made the bon-mot current in the Garrick Club, where he represented himself as lunching with Noah on the Ark.
“You must have good spate fishing here, Mr. Noah,” he reports himself as saying while they sat smoking on the balcony overlooking the Flood.
“It would be good,” replied the host, “but unluckily, you see, I have only two worms.”