44 ANGLING REMINISCENCES. 



your counsel shall be followed to the letter. See 

 what a lovely paralysis it has effected ; the creature is 

 stone dead ; and now I shall creel him up for burial, 

 and join your group. Ha ! Hackle ! you are sketching. 

 A cottage, a tree, a hill, and a river, all indispensable 

 objects in a taking landscape. 



Hackle. Moreover, I shall not forget Doctor Swivel- 

 top in the foreground butchering eels ; it will finely 

 relieve the other ingredients of the scene, and add 

 wonderfully to its general effect. 



Otter. You say justly ; the Doctor's person would 

 help to dignify the subject ; and yet, in sooth, there 

 is much to admire on all sides of us. Yon group of 

 elms might be chosen as the bath-guardians of Diana, 

 they are so leafy and patriarchal. What stems several 

 of them possess ! gnarled and warted over from the 

 root upward ; their shadows too are entirely pagan. 

 One could imagine Night herself to issue out, like a 

 vampire, from under those solemn hangings. No pencil 

 can do them justice. They defy, with their brandished 

 arms, all the trickery of art. 



Hackle. 'Tis a venerable group, but heavy, umbra- 

 geous, and too closely massed for pencil-work ; it wants 

 meaning and variety, and resembles a square thunder- 

 cloud. I dislike it uncommonly, and would rather yon 

 solitary and disfigured oak, blast-worn and thin- 

 mantled as it is a forest-outcast, cleft athwart the 

 chest -its muscles, aye, its heart laid bare, but still 

 existing existing as if in the teeth of nature. 



