were there to be found. I do not speak merely of the rare birds
which may be shot, the curious facts as to the habits of fish which
may be observed, great as these pleasures are. I speak of the
scenery, the weather, the geological formation of the country, its
vegetation, and the living habits of its denizens. A sportsman,
out in all weathers, and often dependent for success on his
knowledge of "what the sky is going to do," has opportunities for
becoming a meteorologist which no one beside but a sailor
possesses; and one has often longed for a scientific gamekeeper or
huntsman, who, by discovering a law for the mysterious and
seemingly capricious phenomena of "scent," might perhaps throw
light on a hundred dark passages of hygrometry. The fisherman,
too, - what an inexhaustible treasury of wonder lies at his feet,
in the subaqueous world of the commonest mountain burn! All the
laws which mould a world are there busy, if he but knew it,
fattening his trout for him, and making them rise to the fly, by
strange electric influences, at one hour rather than at another.
Many a good geognostic lesson, too, both as to the nature of a
country's rocks, and as to the laws by which strata are deposited,
may an observing man learn as he wades up the bed of a trout-
stream; not to mention the strange forms and habits of the tribes
of water-insects. Moreover, no good fisherman but knows, to his
sorrow, that there are plenty of minutes, ay, hours, in each day's
fishing in which he would be right glad of any employment better
than trying to


"Call spirits from the vasty deep,"