winter went to bed at nine precisely, to save coals
and candles. For the rest, he was the most skilful angler in the whole
county; and so willing to communicate the results of his experience as
to the most taking colour of the flies, and the most favoured haunts of
the trout--that he had given especial orders at the inn, that
whenever any strange gentleman came to fish, Mr. Caleb Price should be
immediately sent for. In this, to be sure, our worthy pastor had his
usual recompense. First, if the stranger were tolerably liberal, Mr.
Price was asked to dinner at the inn; and, secondly, if this failed,
from the poverty or the churlishness of the obliged party, Mr. Price
still had an opportunity to hear the last news--to talk about the
Great World--in a word, to exchange ideas, and perhaps to get an old
newspaper, or an odd number of a magazine.

Now, it so happened that one afternoon in October, when the periodical
excursions of the anglers, becoming gradually rarer and more rare, had
altogether ceased, Mr. Caleb Price was summoned from his parlour in
which he had been employed in the fabrication of a net for his cabbages,
by a little white-headed boy, who came to say there was a gentleman at
the inn who wished immediately to see him--a strange gentleman, who had
never been there before.

Mr. Price threw down his net, seized his hat, and, in less than five
minutes, he was in the best room of the little inn.

The person there awaiting him was a man who, though plainly clad in
a velveteen shooting-jacket, had an air and mien greatly above those
common to the pedestrian visitors of A----. He was tall, and of one of
those athletic forms in which vigour in youth is too often followed
by corpulence in age. At this period, however, in the full prime of
manhood--the ample chest and sinewy limbs, seen to full advantage in
their simple and manly dress--could not fail to excite that popular
admiration which is always given to strength in the one sex as to
delicacy in the other. The stranger was walking impatiently to and fro
the small apartment when Mr. Price entered; and then, turning to
the clergyman a countenance handsome and striking, but yet more
prepossessing from its expression of frankness than from the regularity
of its features,--he stopped short, held out his hand, and said, with
a gay laugh, as he glanced over the parson's threadbare and slovenly
costume, "My poor Caleb!--what a metamorphosis!--I should not have known
y