1 78 ANGLING. 



si derate reader. Just for one or other of the many- 

 reasons which induced yourself to do so for we 

 know you write retorts the author. Pleasure, 

 pride, poverty, happiness, hunger, anger, disdain, 

 contempt, candour, fear, love, hatred, hope, know- 

 ledge, malice, misery, dissimulation, philanthropy, 

 philoprogenitiveness, conceit, arrogance, ignorance, 

 these are a few of the many fertile sources from 

 which the things called hooks, " of the making 

 of which there is no end," are ever flowing. We 

 say it in shame, sorrow, and contrition, we never 

 yet met a man who had not written one or more 

 books, and do not expect ever to meet with so per- 

 fect a human being on this side the grave. We 

 once for a few brief hours in early life, deemed that 

 we had done so, even on this " dim spot" which 

 men call earth. We were returning about twenty 

 years ago by the Carlisle mail from Clovenford, 

 after a toilsome, but delightful and productive day 

 in Tweed's crystalline streams. The evening had 

 closed with many a murky frown, the night was 

 dark and boisterous, and in the course of our home- 

 ward journey we could scarcely distinguish by the 

 " ineffectual fire" of Ostler's lantern, as it flickered 

 on the trickling rain-bespattered windows, a bulky 

 fellow-traveller, who kindly talked to us alternately 

 of trouts and trees, and withal in such a racy na- 

 tural way, that we rubbed our hands with joy, and 

 cried internally eureka, here is a man who never 

 wrote a book. Our impression on this point grew 

 stronger and stronger each succeeding mile, and' 

 when at length reaching " our own romantic town," 



