GEORGE DAWSON. 59 



bustling, busy angler, who fishes as long as he can see to 

 do it, morn, noon and dewy eve, in the hope of getting 

 the last trout in the water. Such a man makes a labor of 

 fishing; I go to the woods for rest and other attractions 

 purer, higher and more ennobling than the mere act of 

 taking fish." 



He put these same words down in a notebook, and 

 while in camp wrote an account of the trip to the Journal 

 and used them in its columns in June, 1873, now before 

 me. 



Once, in writing of "how really garrulous are the 

 silent men of meditative mood," and relating how, when 

 in the woods, their faces would be illuminated by the pass- 

 ing thoughts while they were really communing with dis- 

 tant friends, and their silence was only seeming, and mus- 

 ing in an abstracted way was a rare and pleasant gift, he 

 said: "It is not so with the chronically absent-minded, 

 who may be heavy-browed, but are vinegar-visaged and 

 constitutionally morbid, and would no sooner think of 

 angling than of robbing the exchequer of the realm. An 

 editor's life is neither the best nor the worst in which to 

 cultivate this rare gift. There are those in the profession 

 who can so concentrate their thoughts that the pertin- 

 acious pleadings of a score of office-seekers cannot tangle 

 the thread of their meditations. And sometimes even the 

 least abstracted among us have to throw off sentences 

 amid such persistent din that bedlam itself would blush at 

 the clatter. What little of the art came to me by nature 

 and compulsory practice has been strengthened by the 

 opportunities for silent meditation afforded by the habit 

 of angling." Thus spoke the weary political editor, and 

 we read between the lines his disgust with the horde of 

 office-seekers, who, under the ante-civil-service laws, ren- 

 dered miserable the life of every man who had "infloo- 



