creditably, not skulking through the meadows to a rainy afternoon
sport. Dim visions we still get of miraculous draughts of fishes,
and heaps uncountable by the river-side, from the tales of our
seniors sent on horseback in their childhood from the neighboring
towns, perched on saddle-bags, with instructions to get the one
bag filled with shad, the other with alewives. At least one
memento of those days may still exist in the memory of this
generation, in the familiar appellation of a celebrated
train-band of this town, whose untrained ancestors stood
creditably at Concord North Bridge. Their captain, a man of
piscatory tastes, having duly warned his company to turn out on a
certain day, they, like obedient soldiers, appeared promptly on
parade at the appointed time, but, unfortunately, they went
undrilled, except in the manuoevres of a soldier's wit and
unlicensed jesting, that May day; for their captain, forgetting
his own appointment, and warned only by the favorable aspect of
the heavens, as he had often done before, went a-fishing that
afternoon, and his company thenceforth was known to old and
young, grave and gay, as "The Shad," and by the youths of this
vicinity this was long regarded as the proper name of all the
irregular militia in Christendom. But, alas! no record of these
fishers' lives remains that we know, unless it be one brief page
of hard but unquestionable history, which occurs in Day Book
No. 4, of an old trader of this town, long since dead, which
shows pretty plainly what constituted a fisherman's stock in
trade in those days. It purports to be a Fisherman's Account
Current, probably for the fishing season of the year 1805, during
which months he purchased daily rum and sugar, sugar and rum,
N. E. and W. I., "one cod line," "one brown mug," and "a line for
the seine"; rum and sugar, sugar and rum, "good loaf sugar," and