AND AMERICAN RURAL SPORTS. 



149 



my story of my friend H. D. ? the best of all men, although 

 not the best of fishermen, who was out with me on the same 

 stream, and near the same place, one time when I caught 

 twenty dozens, and he two fish less than one dozen; that 

 wondering what had become of him, I sat down on the 

 bank to wait for him, and at length saw him coming to- 

 wards me, very slowly, walking in the middle of the 

 stream, his spectacles — near-sighted — enabling him to 

 choose the deepest parts of it, his line rolled round his rod, 

 and his rod on his shoulder. He would have passed with- 

 out seeing me, and when I said, " Why H., what are you 

 about? Are you tired of fishing?" "Oh, no!" he re- 

 plied, "not at all — I am delighted with it: but this is the 

 best part of it. I don't care about the Trout: you can catch 

 enough for both of us. " 



Do you remember another story I told you, of another 

 person, who accompanied me to catch Trout ? After miss- 

 ing him for a long time, I heard him call at the full extent 

 of his lungs, "I have caught one! I have caught one!!" — 

 and looking up the stream, I saw him holding his rod out in 

 triumph, with something dangling at the end of his line. 

 Observing my attention, he cried, " What shall I do with 

 it? Shall I kill it before I take it ofi"?" And when, in his 

 exultation, he came down to me with it, holding his rod at 

 arm's length before him, I found his captive to be a misera- 

 ble chub, about as long as his finger! A Dr. Battius of a 

 fish! — Plague on Dr. Bat! having spoken of him, I can't 

 get rid of the vagabond. You know we never caught chub 

 — never sufiered them to bite. 



Do you remember what a supper we made on Trout, that 

 night, at our bivouac ? What exquisite sauce our day's 

 fishing had provided for us? How delightfully our cook 

 dressed the fish? How many you eat? — we always chose 

 the small ones, not more than six or seven inches long — 

 How thirsty you were when you awoke, sometime after 

 midnight, from your bed of fragrant boughs? How horror- 

 struck, when, half-dead with thirst, you found that there 

 was no water in the tent? How your impatience would 

 not let you wait until our cook could be roused to bring 

 water from the spring? How you went yourself, in the 

 dark, over logs and through bushes, down to the stream? 

 And how you kept me awake the rest of the night, with 

 your groans of tribulation and repentance at having drank so 

 much cold water? And do you also remember, that, after- 

 wards, during your rambles in Europe, when visiting the 

 classic ground of Petrarch, you wrote to me that much as 

 the Trout of Vaucluse were famed, you could say — for you 

 had just had one for your dinner — that they were not to be 

 compared, by a thousand degrees, to the Trout of Silver 

 Lake? 



And there you are, in Philadelphia, you who can recol- 

 lect all this, plodding away at your profession ! Well, I 



won't check you. Go on, and prosper! Only consider it 

 your duty, during the warm weather of every year, to come 

 up to our hills, and taking a little " idle time not idly 

 spent," lay in a stock of health by breathing our pure air, 

 and bathing in our clear streams. R. H. R. 



AN INQUIRY RESPECTING THE TRUE 

 NATURE OF INSTINCT. 



(Concluded from page 101.) 



If brutes then are incapable of viewing moral qualities 

 objectively, and reflecting upon them as such, they must ne- 

 cessarily be destitute of that perception of moral differ- 

 ences, with which the power of exercising their moral saga- 

 city must be connected; moral sagacity, therefore, cannot 

 exist at all in them otherwise tlian apparently ; and this 

 conclusion is exactly what a candid estimation of brute 

 powers seems to lead to; namely, that they are actuated by 

 moral energies of which they are not conscious, and whicli 

 therefore are not properly theirs; and that these energies 

 operating upon their proper conscious perceptions — which 

 may be termed natural perceptions, to distinguish them 

 from those which are moral and intellectual, — furnish 

 the motive principles which serve to induce them to apply 

 their conscious powers in a certain manner; — thus produc- 

 ing what is apparently moral in them, without their being 

 conscious that it is so, and which thus is really not so as to 

 them. The seat of these moral energies within them, there- 

 fore, appears to be a secret region in their minds, above 

 the seat of their natural perceptions; the latter serving as a 

 plane, as it were, for the operation of such superior powers, 

 which, under the Divine control, dispose them to the fulfil- 

 ment of the ends they are designed for. 



In this manner it is possible to account for those surpris- 

 ing appearances of moral excellence in the actions of ani- 

 mals, which we observe them to display, and which are so 

 totally above their proper conscious powers: — a moral excel- 

 lence, which, as we have seen, appears in many instances 

 more perfect and undeviating than that of the generality of 

 human agents, and which, therefore, cannot be the result of 

 any conscious freedom in the creature, unless we suppose 

 them, in particular instances, raised higher in moral per- 

 ception and determination than even man himself. It is 

 by confounding the limited freedom of brute action with 

 the superior energies, which, unknown to them, actuate 

 their conscious powers, that their nature has been so far mis- 

 taken, as to be considered the same in kind with, and only 

 differing in degree from, that of man. 



Herein then consists one proper limitation of the brute 

 mind : — although apparently moral, it is in reality not so, but 

 merely natural, and is operated upon by moral causes above 



