36 ANGLING REMINISCENCES. 



your counsel shall be followed to the letter. See 

 what a lovely paralysis it has effected ; the crea- 

 ture 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, arid a river, 

 all indispensable objects in a taking landscape. 



Hackle. Moreover, I shall not forget Doctor 

 Swiveltop 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 so- 

 lemn hangings. No pencil can do them justice. 

 They defy, with their brandished arms, all the 

 trickery of art. 



Hackle. J 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 a- 

 thwart the chest its muscles, aye, its heart laid bare, 

 but still existing existing as if in the teeth of nature. 



