Human life is to him very much like a
river,
"renning aie downward to the sea."
This was his observation. His honor made a great discovery in
bailments.
I can just remember an old brown-coated man who was the Walton of
this stream, who had come over from Newcastle, England, with his
son,--the latter a stout and hearty man who had lifted an anchor
in his day. A straight old man he was who took his way in silence
through the meadows, having passed the period of communication
with his fellows; his old experienced coat, hanging long and
straight and brown as the yellow-pine bark, glittering with so
much smothered sunlight, if you stood near enough, no work of art
but naturalized at length. I often discovered him unexpectedly
amid the pads and the gray willows when he moved, fishing in some
old country method,--for youth and age then went a fishing
together,--full of incommunicable thoughts, perchance about his
own Tyne and Northumberland. He was always to be seen in serene
afternoons haunting the river, and almost rustling with the
sedge; so many sunny hours in an old man's life, entrapping silly
fish; almost grown to be the sun's familiar; what need had he of
hat or raiment any, having served out his time, and seen through
such thin disguises? I have seen how his coeval fates rewarded
him with the yellow perch, and yet I thought his luck was not in
proportion to his years; and I have seen when, with slow steps
and weighed down with aged thoughts, he disappeared with his fish
under his low-roofed house on the skirts of the village.
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