“Just here I wish to record an event which has happened to me while yet each detail is fresh in my memory.
“The day had been showery, yet the fishing had been very poor, so I went at sunset to try my luck in the stream near the house, where are some fair pools and a semi-occasional trout.
“The darkness had begun to gather, indeed it was so dark that I knew only by the instinct of habit where my flies fell upon the water, for I could not fairly see them. I had just made a cast across a little rock which protruded somewhat above the surface into a small pool behind, and was slowly drawing my line toward me, when I perceived a frog seated upon the rock, watching the proceedings with some apparent anxiety. Hardly had I made out his frogship in the gloaming, when pop! he went into the water. ‘Kerchung!’ At this instant I felt a strike and returned the compliment sharply, so as to set my hook well in and make sure of my trout. He was very game, and I was obliged to play him with a five and a half ounce rod for some time, but finally landed him in good form, only to discover that instead of a trout I had taken froggy on a black hackle fly, setting the hook firmly into the thin membrane which connects the two hind legs and just where the tail ought to be. This left him the fullest freedom of action and gave him so good a chance to fight me that I never suspected him of being anything less than a half-pounder. He must have jumped from the rock directly on to the fly trailing behind it and been thus hooked by my ‘strike.’ Mem. —This story is true as gospel, but better not tell it where you enjoy an exceptional reputation for veracity.
“July 19th. * * * Nothing has happened! Nothing ever does happen here. Delightful existence, free from events! I remember hearing Homer Martin once say that it was the height of his artistic ambition to paint a picture without objects. The confounded objects, he said, always would get wrong and destroy his best effects. How far this was intended to be a humorous paradox and how far the suggestion of an artistic ideal, I know not, but I surely somewhere have seen a painting—from whose brush I cannot say—which quite nearly fulfilled this strange condition. It represented an horizon, where met a cloudless, moonless, starless summer sky and a waveless, almost motionless sea—these and an atmosphere. The effect was that one could hardly perceive where the sea ceased and the sky began. I wonder if it would not be thus with a life quite devoid of events—would one be able to distinguish such from Heaven?
“The charm of it is that it leaves both the physical and intellectual in one to develop freely. When a cow, grazing in a woodland pasture, comes at noonday to the brook to drink and then calmly and not without a certain ungainly majesty of movement, crosses the deep pool and climbs the steep hank on the other side, by no apparent motive urged save of her own sweet will, she always looks refreshed and filled in some sort with the stolid bovine expression of great contentment. Mark how different it all is when the same cow crosses the same brook driven by the barefooted urchin with a gad and shrill cries and a possible small dog in the background. How wearily and breathlessly she wades, and with what distressful pan tings she climbs, and how unhappy and enduring and long-suffering she appears, as you watch her shuffle away down the cow-path homeward! It’s the Must that hurts. It’s the barefooted urchin Necessity with his infernal gad Ambition and his ugly little cur dog Want, always chasing and shouting after one, that makes it so tiresome to cross the stream.
“Then, too, as to the mind. Shall not one gain better intellectual growth when beyond the reach of the imperial ukase of daily custom which fixes the mind upon and chains the tongue to some leading event of the passing hour?
“In swift and endless succession come foul murders, robberies, revolutions, sickening disasters, nameless crimes, and all the long list of events, and are as so many manacles upon the mind.
“I hate Events. They bore me. All except taking a pound trout.
“Alas! what a rent these last words make in the balloon I have been inflating! Logic (another troublesome nuisance, evolved, probably, at Hunter’s Point) forces me from the clouds to earth and insists that I shall accept a trite aphorism: ‘Little events fill little minds; great events for big ones.’
“Then if I take refuge in the cowardly device of saying I don’t want a big mind, what becomes of my theory of intellectual development as the outgrowth of an eventless life!