PLEASURES OF ANGLING. 



be deemed as unconscious and as unsusceptible 

 as the iron row-locks whose monotonous music 

 makes regular record of the march of time. 

 But their silence is only in seeming. They 

 are all the while holding sprightly mental conver- 

 sation with absent friends, with favorite authors, 

 with the mountains and forests and lakes which 

 surround them, or are rehearsing some pleasant 

 incident of field or flood to some sympathizing ac- 

 quaintance, who is as really present, giving atten- 

 tive audience, as if separated from them by but an 

 arm's length instead of a hundred miles. I have 

 seen such thoughtful wise men startled from their 

 re very, who seemed surprised that they were not 

 surrounded by a bevy of companions. This power 

 of abstraction is a rare and pleasant gift. It 

 differs in itself and in its possessors from absent- 

 mindedness, which with me is always associated 

 with glum moroseness, or at least with an absence 

 of joyous geniality. But the j oiliest-hearted may, 

 under favoring circumstances, be abstracted, and 

 wake up from his revery without losing a single 

 ray of the pleasant sunshine with which his happy 

 countenance is always illumined. It is not so with 

 the chronically absent-minded, who may be heavy- 

 browed but vinegar-visaged and constitutionally 

 morbid, and who would no sooner think of angling 

 than of robbing the exchequer of the realm. 



