o are commonly reported to catch such enormous strings of fish,
but who rarely, so far as my observation goes, do anything more than
fill their pockets with fingerlings. The trained angler, who uses the
finest tackle, and drops his fly on the water as accurately as Henry
James places a word in a story, is the man who takes the most and the
largest fish in the long run. Perhaps the fisherman ahead of you is such
an one,--a man whom you have known in town as a lawyer or a doctor,
a merchant or a preacher, going about his business in the hideous
respectability of a high silk hat and a long black coat. How good it
is to see him now in the freedom of a flannel shirt and a broad-brimmed
gray felt with flies stuck around the band.

In Professor John Wilson's Essays Critical and Imaginative, there is a
brilliant description of a bishop fishing, which I am sure is drawn from
the life: "Thus a bishop, sans wig and petticoat, in a hairy cap, black
jacket, corduroy breeches and leathern leggins, creel on back and rod in
hand, sallying from his palace, impatient to reach a famous salmon-cast
ere the sun leave his cloud, . . . appears not only a pillar of his
church, but of his kind, and in such a costume is manifestly on the high
road to Canterbury and the Kingdom-Come." I have had the good luck to
see quite a number of bishops, parochial and diocesan, in that style,
and the vision has always dissolved my doubts in regard to the validity
of their claim to the true apostolic succession.

Men's "little ways" are usually more interesting, and often more
instructive than their grand manners. When they are off guard, they
frequently show to better advantage than when they are on parade. I get
more pleasure out of Boswell's Johnson than I do out of Rasselas or
The Rambler. The Little Flowers of St. Francis appear to me far more
precious than the most learned German and French analyses of his
character. There is a passage in Jonathan Edwards' Personal Narrative,
about a certain walk that he took in the fields near his father's house,
and the blossoming of the flowers in the spring, which I would not
exchange for the whole of his dissertation On the Freedom of the Will.
And the very best thing of Charles Darwin's that I know is a bit from a
letter to his wife: "At last I fell asleep," says he, "on the grass, and
awoke with a chorus of birds singing around me, and squirrels running
up the tree, and some woodpeckers laughing; and it was as pl