"
The floods themselves are also disappearing. Mr. Edmund Clarence
Stedman was telling me, the other day, of the trout-brook that used
to run through the Connecticut village when he nourished a poet's
youth. He went back to visit the stream a few years since, and it
was gone, literally vanished from the face of earth, stolen to make
a watersupply for the town, and used for such base purposes as the
washing of clothes and the sprinkling of streets.
I remember an expedition with my father, some twenty years ago, to
Nova Scotia, whither we set out to realize the hopes kindled by an
ANGLER'S GUIDE written in the early sixties. It was like looking
for tall clocks in the farmhouses around Boston. The harvest had
been well gleaned before our arrival, and in the very place where
our visionary author located his most famous catch we found a summer
hotel and a sawmill.
'T is strange and sad, how many regions there are where "the fishing
was wonderful forty years ago"!
The second class of angling books--the literature of power--includes
all (even those written with some purpose of instruction) in which
the gentle fascinations of the sport, the attractions of living out-
of-doors, the beauties of stream and woodland, the recollections of
happy adventure, and the cheerful thoughts that make the best of a
day's luck, come clearly before the author's mind and find some fit
expression in his words.
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