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Side 5 av 112
Look at those two venerable gentlemen floating in a skiff upon the
clear waters of Lake George. One of them is a successful statesman,
an ex-President of the United States, a lawyer versed in all the
curious eccentricities of the "lawless science of the law." The
other is a learned doctor of medicine, able to give a name to all
diseases from which men have imagined that they suffered, and to
invent new ones for those who are tired of vulgar maladies. But all
their learning is forgotten, their cares and controversies are laid
aside, in "innocuous desuetude." The Summer School of Sociology is
assembled. The Medical Congress is in session.
But they care not--no, not so much as the value of a single live
bait. The sun shines upon them with a fervent heat, but it irks
them not. The rain descends, and the winds blow and beat upon them,
but they are unmoved. They are securely anchored here in the lee of
Sabbath-Day Point.
What enchantment binds them to that inconsiderable spot? What magic
fixes their eyes upon the point of a fishing-rod, as if it were the
finger of destiny? It is the enchantment of uncertainty: the same
natural magic that draws the little suburban boys in the spring of
the year, with their strings and pin-hooks, around the shallow ponds
where dace and redfins hide; the same irresistible charm that fixes
a row of city gamins, like ragged and disreputable fish-crows, on
the end of a pier where blear-eyed flounders sometimes lurk in the
muddy water. Let the philosopher explain it as he will. Let the
moralist reprehend it as he chooses. There is nothing that attracts
human nature more powerfully than the sport of tempting the unknown
with a fishing-line.
Those ancient anglers have set out upon an exodus from the tedious
realm of the definite, the fixed, the must-certainly-come-to-pass.
They are on a holiday in the free country of peradventure. They do
not know at this moment whether the next turn of Fortune's reel will
bring up a perch or a pickerel, a sunfish or a black bass. It may
be a hideous catfish or a squirming eel, or it may be a lake-trout,
the grand prize in the Lake George lottery. There they sit, those
gray-haired lads, full of hope, yet equally prepared for
resignation; taking no thought for the morrow, and ready to make the
best of to-day; harmless and happy players at the best of all games
of chance.
"In other words," I hear some severe and sour-complexioned reader
say, "in plain language, they are a pair of old gamblers."
Yes, if it pleases you to call honest men by a bad name. But they
risk nothing that is not their own; and if they lose, they are not
impoverished. They desire nothing that belongs to other men; and if
they win, no one is robbed. If all gambling were like that, it
would be difficult to see the harm in it. Indeed, a daring moralist
might even assert, and prove by argument, that so innocent a delight
in the taking of chances is an aid to virtue.
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