MORALITY OF ANGLING. 267 



ment think there was, after all, a little fun and a little 

 pleasure in his business, you would have him take a 

 round turn with his line, and drop on his knees to ask 

 forgiveness for the sin of thinking there was sport in 

 fishing. 



" I can imagine the sad-faced, melancholy-eyed man, 

 who makes it his business to supply game for the market 

 as you would have him, sober as the sexton in Hamlet, 

 and forever moralizing over the gloomy necessity that 

 has doomed him to a life of murder ! Why, sir, he would 

 frighten respectable fish, and the market would soon be 

 destitute. 



" The keenest day's sport in my journal of a great 

 many years of sport was when, in company with some 

 other gentlemen, I took three hundred blue-fish in three 

 hours' fishing off Block Island, and those fish were eaten 

 the same night or the next morning in Stonington, and 

 supplied from fifty to a hundred different tables, as we 

 threw them up on the dock for any one to help himself. 

 I am unable to perceive that I committed any sin in tak- 

 ing them, or any sin in the excitement and pleasure of 

 taking them. 



" It is time moralists had done with this mistaken mo- 

 rality. If you eschew animal food entirely, then you may 

 argue against killing animals, and I will not argue with 

 you. But the logic of this business is simply this: The 

 Creator made fish and flesh for the food of man, and as 

 we can't eat them alive, or if we do we can't digest them 

 alive, the result is we must kill them first, and (see the 

 old rule for cooking a dolphin) it is sometimes a further 

 necessity, since they won't come to be killed when we 

 call them, that we must first catch them. Show first, then, 

 that it is a painful necessity — a necessity to be avoided 



