14 ANGLING REMINISCENCES. 



and the small pendant cap which confined his scanty 

 locks was self and same with the latter material. 



Our great-grandfather did not live on air. He 

 required to be fed, and sometimes we marvelled at 

 the appetite of the old man ; he ate like a boy in 

 his teens, and swallowed his wine-gruel with won- 

 derful avidity. But it was a mechanical appetite 

 after all the palate was gone, and the functions 

 of the stomach at a stand. Had you offered him 

 gravel, he would have gaped for it, and exerted 

 his gums upon pease-straw. The exercise of eating, 

 however, sustained him ; his jaw-bones kept him alive. 



Very old men necessarily lose many of their 

 faculties, and our ancestor was in a manner both 

 deaf and blind. He heard and saw, however, by 

 fits ; and frequently would nod to an angling ac- 

 quaintance, and such only, in an automaton fashion, 

 without offering a single sign of further recognition. 

 To some, it seemed strange how suddenly he could 

 relapse into a state of the most absolute indifference, 

 erecting himself slightly in his chair, and fixing his 

 rigid eyeballs upon the opposite side of the apart- 

 ment. Now, that we recollect, he breathed his last in 

 this very position. We were sitting along with him, 

 engaged in the perusal of an amusing book, and 

 ever and anon casting our eyes towards the venerable 

 chair which he occupied, little suspecting how 

 silently within its confines death was at work, when 

 a slight deviation from the perpendicular attitude, 



