"rari nantes in gurgite vasto."

The floods themselves are also disappearing.  Mr. Edmund Clarence
Stedman was telling me, the other day, of the trout-brook that used
to run through the Connecticut village when he nourished a poet's
youth.  He went back to visit the stream a few years since, and it
was gone, literally vanished from the face of earth, stolen to make
a watersupply for the town, and used for such base purposes as the
washing of clothes and the sprinkling of streets.

I remember an expedition with my father, some twenty years ago, to
Nova Scotia, whither we set out to realize the hopes kindled by an
ANGLER'S GUIDE written in the early sixties.  It was like looking
for tall clocks in the farmhouses around Boston.  The harvest had
been well gleaned before our arrival, and in the very place where
our visionary author located his most famous catch we found a summer
hotel and a sawmill.

'T is strange and sad, how many regions there are where "the fishing
was wonderful forty years ago"!

The second class of angling books--the literature of power--includes
all (even those written with some purpose of instruction) in which
the gentle fascinations of the sport, the attractions of living out-
of-doors, the beauties of stream and woodland, the recollections of
happy adventure, and the cheerful thoughts that make the best of a
day's luck, come clearly before the author's mind and find some fit
expression in his words.  Of such books, thank Heaven, there is a
plenty to bring a Maytide charm and cheer into the fisherman's dull
December.  I will name, by way of random tribute from a grateful but
unmethodical memory, a few of these consolatory volumes.

First of all comes a family of books that were born in Scotland and
smell of the heather.

Whatever a Scotchman's conscience permits him to do, is likely to be
done with vigour and a fiery mind.  In trade and in theology, in
fishing and in fighting, he is all there and thoroughly kindled.

There is an old-fashioned book called THE MOOR AND THE LOCH, by John
Colquhoun, which is full of contagious enthusiasm.  Thomas Tod
Stoddart was a most impassioned angler, (though over-given to strong
language,) and in his ANGLING REMINISCENCES he has touched the
subject with a happy hand,--happiest when he breaks into poetry and
tosses out a song for the fisherman.  Professor John Wilson of the
University of Edinburgh held the chair of Moral Philosophy in that
institution, but his true fame rests on his well-earned titles of A.
M. and F. R. S.,--Master of Angling, and Fisherman Royal of
Scotland.  His RECREATIONS OF CHRISTOPHER NORTH, albeit their humour
is sometimes too boisterously hammered in, are genial and generous
essays, overflowing with passages of good-fellowship and pedestrian
fancy.  I would recommend any person in a dry and melancholy state
of mind to read his paper on "Streams," in the first volume of
ESSAYS CRITICAL AND IMAGINATIVE.  But it must be said, by way of
warning to those with whom dryness is a matter of principle, that
all Scotch fishing-books are likely to be sprinkled with Highland
Dew.