Hence the value which those sturdy, sober, untranscendental, unmedieval thinkers, the Scotch writers, have set upon field-sports and exercises which carry them out among the heather, over the mountain, and along the stream. Christopher North, (green be the turf above him!) "under canvas," was worth more as a philosopher, aye, as a philosopher, than any cobweb-spinning German, or backward-looking Oxonian that ever ignored common humanity and its every-day experience. Dyspepsia never soured his moral sentiments, and, content with the cheerful sun, he left twilight to owls and bats.
Views like these led the little band of friends already spoken of to the Piseco, on whose romantic bank they had built a simple lodge, and whose waters abounded with several varieties of that aquatic family, whose charms inspired Davy, not less admirable as a moralist than an illustrator of natural science, to write his Salmonia. Some of them were shrewd and successful in business; some of them more given to books; one of them a preacher of Good News, who loved his work, called Chaplain, not without warrant, for his office was no sinecure; and all of them "honest, civil, and temperate," as all anglers should be, and as (according to Izaak Walton's infallible authority) all true anglers are. The lake is about seven miles long, and nearly a mile and a half wide. Several bays are curved out of the shore, the deepest, at the lower end, called from an Indian, the stories told of whose life might make the whole tradition apocryphal, had he not left his name, Girondicut (the spelling is uncertain) to the most exquisite part of the water. Some buildings, most of them abandoned to decay, show like a peaceful hamlet at the upper end, but are hidden by a wooded promontory from the lodge, before whose humble porch a clearod field, flourishing with corn and grass, slopes gently toward the lake. Everywhere else Nature is in her wildest grace or most sublime magnificence.
Up in the morning with the thrush, (the lark Piseco knows not, but the thrush is as early,) each in his well-trimmed boat, rowed by a sinewy woodsman, with a rod out over each side, the friends parted to troll in various directions, never so intent on their game as not to enjoy the shadows deep in the clear waters, or watch the mists, as
