I take up my own, quoting from it almost at random note, if you please, how, in untamed words, have expressed themselves the exhilaration of the stream—the tingling of healthy blood through ample veins—the joy in nature’s aspects, and the delightful sense of unrestraint that comes only of fresh air, of wholesome exercise, of angling.
“May 20th.— * * * The streams hereabout lack two important elements which are the charm of my favorite——kill, to wit, picturesqueness and the possibility of large trout—large, I mean, for our mountain brooks where still found au naturel. I went over the other day to Bright’s Run. I don’t know exactly where it is, and I consider it (next to Bright’s disease of the kidneys) the very worst thing Bright has developed. It is a stream such as might properly empty into the Dismal Swamp, and find itself quite at home there. It is totally devoid, of romantic beauty—and nearly so of trout. I never worked so hard in my life for twenty-two little ones, that put me to the blush as I put them in the basket. I was perpetually in a row with the overhanging thickets and the underlying logs, and my thoughts were a monologue of exclamation points. I would not angle in Bright’s turgid waters again for all the trout the most minute analysis might discover in them.
“Yesterday I had a much more agreeable day without a seven-mile ride on a pesky buck-board. I went quite alone, up the Buckhill as far as the Fall. This is a pleasant stream full of nature—and sawdust—with here and there a speckled trout and here and there a black snake. (By special permission of mr. Tennyson.) There really are now and then cool little nooks which make one envy the trout; and an occasional spring dripping with a fresh rat-tat-tat over rocks and moss and into one’s whiskey in spite of all one can do. This sort of thing is what makes a trout-stream after all. You may catch a whale in a goose-pond but it isn’t angling. To me much depends upon surroundings. I like to form a picturesque part of a picturesque whole. Even when there is no audience in the gallery.
“Given, a dark glen fringed with pines that sigh and pine high up aloft—a pool whose sweep is deep, around which rocks in tiers, mossy as tombstones centuries old, bow their heads in mourning—heads crowned with weeds, and grave-mounds of mother earth, and pallid flowers, pale plants and sapless vines that struggle through shadows of a day in coma, laid in the hearse of night, without a proper permit, and I am happy. I don’t know just why, but if I meet an undertaker I mean to ask him. All these deep, dark hiding spots of nature seem but so many foils to the keen sense of life and thrills of vitality that fill me. My nervous system sparkles against such sombre backgrounds.
“Then, too, the Fall was lovely. Next to Niagara, the Kauterskill and Adams’, this Buckhill Fall is one of the most successful, in a small way, that I know of. It might be bigger and higher and have twenty-five cents worth more water coming over it out of a dam; but for a mere casual Fall gotten up inadvertently by nature, it is very good, in an amateurish sort of away, you know!
“There is, I believe (hang it, there always is!) a romantic legend connected with—but stay!—you already guess it. Big Buck Indian—years ago—in love with mother-in-law—commits suicide—jumps over the ledge—ever since on moonlight nights, water the color of blood (probably tannery just above the Fall), Buck Kill, now corrupted into Buckhill. In the march of civilization the last impedimenta to be left by the wayside are the beautiful superstitions of ignorance.
“I am now quite alone here. A young music composer, hitherto my companion, left yesterday, so I am handcuffed to nature in solitary confinement.
“By the way, my composer was a voluntary exile from the domestic arena. He had but recently married—to formulate it by proportions—say about a ton of mother-in-law to about an ounce of wife, and when the contest waxed fiercer than became the endurance of a sensitive nature, he packed his bag and came a-fishing. He was a capital angler—a phenomenal musician and had an appetite and digestion like one or more of the valiant trencher men of England’s merrie days, so he solaced his grief with Sonatas and buckwheat cakes in the mornings and tears and ginger-bread in the evenings. He was a born genius and as beautiful as a dream, so I advised him to go home, choke his m-in-l, kiss his wife and live happily all the days of his life. I think he has gone to try the plan.
“Speaking of buckwheat cakes, you can go out here most any time and catch a nice mess running about a half a pound and game all the way through. No! No!
“I’m thinking of the trout! I mean they are light as a feather, and taste to me just as did those I never had half enough of when I was a lad with my good old Presbyterian grandmother, who would not ‘set’ the batter on Saturday night lest it should ‘work’ on the Sabbath.