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THE CABINET OF NATURAL HISTORY, 
cure in this city a rod thoroughly seasoned, well balanced, 
and made of proper materials. The India joint rods which 
are so common, cannot be depended upon. They should 
be made of hard, solid wood, tipped with whalebone, of 
great elasticity and strength. It will be found to be very 
convenient to attach a short, stout spear-point to the fer- 
rule of the rod, which can he thrust into the turf, from 
time to time. Indeed, many of the best imported rods are 
provided with this useful instrument. There is no better 
sport than that of taking the large salmon trout. It re- 
quires no little generalship to capture this wary rover. It 
will require all your science as a tactician, in the cautious 
advance, in the guarded retreat, to outmanoeuvre him. If 
you press him too hotly, he will inevitably escape from 
you, bearing away with him in triumph, your whole 
length of line, hooks and all, as his opima spolia, the evi- 
dences to his comrades, of his strength and cunning, and 
of your defeat. A man never looks more like that person 
which Dr. Johnson maliciously describes an angler to be, 
than when standing upon a brook side with a rod in his 
hand, whose line, a veteran trout has borne away to his 
cell some fifteen feet under the bank. The salmon trout 
abounds in our large lakes and ponds, and is often taken in 
streams. The following lines by James Hogg, one of the 
sweetest of British poets, I will venture, in consideration 
of their beauty, to insert. 
Thou bonny fish from the far sea, 
Whose waves unwearied roll 
In primitive immensity, 
Aye buffeting the pole ! 
From millions of thy silvery kind 
In that wide waste that dwell, 
Thou only power and path did’st find, 
To reach this lonely dell. 
And now my beauty ! bold and well 
Thy pilgrim-course has been, 
For thou like Wordsworth’s Peter Bell, 
Hast gazed on Aberdeen ! 
And all those sweetest banks between, 
By Invercauld’s broad tree, 
The world of beauty hast thou seen 
That sleeps upon the Dee. 
There oft in silence clear and bright 
Thou layest, a shadow still, 
In some green nook where with delight 
Joins in the mountain-rill, 
There in the waters scarce-heard boom, 
Didst thou float, and rise, and sink, 
While o’er the breathing banks of broom, 
The wild-deer came to drink. 
Vain sparry grot and verdant cave 
The stranger to detain — 
For thou wast wearied of the wave, 
And loud voice of the main ; 
And nought thy heart could satisfy, 
But those clear gravelly rills, 
Where once a young and happy fry, 
Thou danced among the hills ! 
The river roaring down the rock, 
The fierce and foaming linn, 
Essayed to stay thee with the shock, 
The dark and dizzy din — 
With wilier malice nets did twist 
To perfect thy undoing, 
But all those dangers hast thou missed, 
True to thy destined ruin ! 
The poetical angler meant, I suppose, to insinuate by 
“True to thy destined ruin,” that after listening year after 
year to “ The loud voice of the main,” lying like a shadow 
in security by “Invercauld’s broad tree,” the noble subject 
of his poem was pi’edestined to die by his hand. Indeed 
to perish by his hand, would be (in the savage language of 
Metamora,) to “die gloriously.” Indeed if he were but 
half as skilful in casting as in composing lines, no fin could 
resist or escape him. 
PROGNOSTICS OF THE WEATHER. 
The success of the Chase and Shooting must always 
depend on the weather; and therefore the following prog- 
nostics will be interesting to the Sportsman: — 
Clouds . — When there are two different currents of 
clouds, especially if the lowest flies fast before the wind, 
and these appear in hot weather, in the summer, they por- 
tend the gathering of a thunder-storm. 
When thin whitish clouds fly swiftly in the air under 
those that are thicker, and when small scattered ones ap- 
pear in clear weather, rain. 
When a general cloudiness covers the sky above, with 
small black fragments of clouds, like smoke, driving un- 
derneath, rain is not far off, and will probably be lasting. 
If a black cloud is seen in the west about sun-setting, and 
when, at any time, such clouds arise suddenly in that 
quarter, rain. 
When clouds are formed like fleeces, dense toward the 
centre, and very white at the extremities, with a bright 
and blue sky about them, they are of a frosty coldness, and 
will soon fall, either in snow, hail, or hasty showers of 
rain . 
