on 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.

Do you remember Martin Luther's reasoning on the subject of "excellent
large pike"? He maintains that God would never have created them so good
to the taste, if He had not meant them to be eaten. And for the same
reason I conclude that this world would never have been left so full of
uncertainties, nor human nature framed so as to find a peculiar joy and
exhilaration in meeting them bravely and cheerfully, if it had not been
divinely intended that most of our amusement and much of our education
should come from this source.

"Ch