SPIRIT OF THE CHASE 15 



was a grave drawback, generously proposed to insert 

 his tackle and grapple the fish by the tail. That 

 would make sure, he said. The minister, beside us 

 by this time, supported the suggestion ; but my 

 silence was not taken as consent. I felt that if the 

 fish got off the disaster would be great ; yet I was 

 equally unwilling to have only a share in its capture. 

 After much agitation, that salmon, not a large one, 

 lay safely on the bank. Then the minister, who had 

 been very pleasant in his remarks during the struggle, 

 lifted up his voice and his silver-topped cane, and 

 delivered an address. Upon my word, he did. I was 

 to take a solemn lesson from what had happened. 

 Patience and perseverance. They had overcome that 

 salmon. They would overcome all the difficulties of 

 life. Care, diligence, assiduity; no undue haste, 

 which would always defeat its purpose. Even as I 

 was to be a devoted servant of duty, so, in duty 

 accomplished, I was always to be temperate in satis- 

 faction. This discourse, to which I listened with 

 downcast eyes, was strangely discomposing. It 

 awoke, as if with a tug at the roots of thought, the 

 analytic and critical spirit. It fanned dim dubiety 

 into reason. The chastening could not have been 

 more severe if I had lost the salmon. There seemed 

 to be something wrong in the doctrine. I could not 

 understand how any one could be reasonably held 

 up as an example to himself. It was not, however, 

 a sense of injustice that perturbed me most. What 

 did that was a feeling of something weird, something 

 neither human nor divine, in moral solicitude on an 



