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SAINT MARTIN'S EVE. 



AN IRISH LEGEND. BY J. S. COYNE. 



" Good luck to your fishing, what seek you to-night V* 



THERE are not a few men in the world who, despite the humane 

 dissuasions of Thomson and the angry sensibilities of Byron, con- 

 tinue to uphold the maxims of the quaint Izaak Walton against ail 

 argument, and to pursue his favourite pastime with the most exem- 

 plary patience and assiduity in all seasons, and under circumstances 

 which might cool the enthusiasm of a martyr. I have often marvelled 

 at the unwearied endurance of an established angler standing per- 

 haps knee-deep in the water like a solitary crane on the borders of a 

 sedgy river, throwing his fly from sun-rise to sun-set, cold, wet, 

 and famished; without one " glorious nibble" to repay his toil, 

 or without the remotest chance of catching any thing but a despe- 

 rate cold. Such a character was my friend Jack Wilson. No man 

 in the country could cast a forty feet line with such precision, or make 

 the fly descend gently as thistle-down upon the water, like honest 

 Jack; his whole soul seemed centred in the pursuit of his darling 

 sport, and the entire range of his reading was confined to the afore- 

 said Izaak Walton, whom he venerated more than Homer or Shak- 

 speare, and to " The Angling Excursions of Geoffry Greendrake, 

 Esq.," an author whom he had adopted as his model for all that 

 is virtuous and excellent in man. 



A circumstance unnecessary for me to relate here made Jack 

 and myself compagnons du voyage to Limerick in the summer of 

 18. We sojourned at the same hotel ; each day we viewed toge- 

 ther the remarkable antiquities of this ancient city, and every evening, 

 after dining together, we leisurely imbibed our two bottles of port, 

 during the discussion of which Jack always took occasion to expa- 

 tiate in glowing language upon the delights of angling on a good 

 fishing stream with a taking fly on a dark lowering morning in May, 

 a gentle west wind rippling the water, and a delicious mizzling rain 

 soaking to your very skin. Now, though I was obstinate enough to 

 persist in the superior comforts of the well-furnished dining-room of 

 the hotel, a cheerful companion, and the fish that Jack delighted to 

 inveigle by insidious arts smoking on my plate, I somehow suffered 

 myself to be seduced by my companion on a salmon-fishing excur- 

 sion to Castleconnell, a village on the banks of the Shannon, a few 

 miles from Limerick, celebrated in Ireland for the efficacy of its 

 medicinal waters and the potency of its distilled waters. Anticipating 

 a day's excellent sport, Jack, by five o'clock on the following morn- 

 ing, had equipped himself with the singular paraphernalia of the 

 gentle craft. At his back, attached to a leathern belt, was slung ar* 

 oblong wicker basket with an aperture in the top like a parish poor- 

 box to receive his piscatorial spoils, a landing net surmounted thg 



MM. No. 6. 2 Q 



