OUR OPENING DAY. 5 



opportunities and means of using both in moderation, 

 ought to be happy and healthy. This brotherhood of men 

 who love the gentle art with unswerving fidelity includes 

 persons through whose estates well-stocked salmon-rivers 

 sweep, but some of these days you shall see them enjoying 

 with the keenest relish an afternoon's roach or gudgeon 

 fishing by the banks of a prosaic stream. We earn our 

 right to recreation by work of divers kinds on Exchanges, 

 in Government offices, in establishments where printing- 

 presses groan and struggle, in Westminster Hall, in cham- 

 bers; we buy and sell, we toil by brain and hand, we 

 are rich and poor, we are old and young, but we are 

 not ashamed a second time to avow ourselves followers 

 of quaint, pure-hearted Izaak Walton, whose nature was 

 eminently unselfish. 



By listening quietly awhile you will discover how true 

 it is that we are a gossiping race ; but note that our talk is 

 all of one warp and woof. This is the hour when the 

 smoking rooms of clubs where politicians and the great 

 ones of the earth do congregate are handling freely public 

 and private scandals, questions of national pith and mo- 

 ment, controversies weighty and bitter. Here we are in 

 the town, but not of it. We are bodily present, but in 

 spirit far away. Possessing in common a devotion to 

 angling, there are all kinds of branch fondnesses by which 

 certain men are known, each warranting, however, Wash- 

 ington Irving's observation, " There is certainly something 

 in angling that tends to produce a gentleness of spirit and 

 a pure serenity of mind." 



There is not a man present to whose love of angling 

 there is not grafted some other pleasant pursuit or liking. 



