“Why, look you, squire, said the major-domo. You may call a lake-fish
that will weigh twenty or thirty pounds a serious matter, but to a man
who has hauled in a shovel-nosed shirk, d’ye see, it’s but a poor kind
of fishing after all.”

“I don’t know, Benjamin,” returned the sheriff; “a haul of one
thousand Otsego bass, without counting pike, pickerel, perch, bull-
pouts, salmon-trouts, and suckers, is no bad fishing, let me tell you.
There may he sport in sticking a shark, but what is he good for after
you have got him? Now, any one of the fish that I have named is fit to
set before a king.”

“Well, squire,” returned Benjamin, “just listen to the philosophy of
the thing. Would it stand to reason, that such a fish should live and
be catched in this here little pond of water, where it’s hardly deep
enough to drown a man, as you’ll find in the wide ocean, where, as
every body knows that is, everybody that has followed the seas, whales
and grampuses are to be seen, that are as long as one of the pine-
trees on yonder mountain?”

“Softly, softly, Benjamin,” said the sheriff, as if he wished to save
the credit of his favorite; “why, some of the pines will measure two
hundred feet, and even more.”

“Two hundred or two thousand, it’s all the same thing,” cried
Benjamin, with an air which manifested that he was not easily to be
bullied out of his opinion, on a subject like the present. “ Haven’t
I been there, and haven’t I seen? I have said that you fall in with
whales as long as one of them there pines: and what I have once said