Did you ever watch a bevy of city swells and society belles swinging and whirling under flaming chandeliers until the coat-tails of the swells popped like whip crackers and the skirts of the belles flapped like the sails of a schooner in a high wind? That was a piping gale of pleasure in high life in the town. Did you ever attend a great reception in the heart of the metropolis? It was a gorgeous scene of icicles and spectacles, of broadcloth, and jewels arrayed in white slippers and costly gowns of richest colors; and the icicles and spectacles bowed to the jewels, and the jewels bowed to the icicles and spectacles and they held sweet converse on the subject of their bicycles and tricycles and various and sundry articles and drank champagne and sherry and all got very merry and wound up with oysters and dill pickles. And then the tipsy icicles and spectacles got in their elegant vehicles and went home with the jewels in the morning. That was the cream of urban civilization. Did you ever gaze on a gaudy throng of bald-headed Apollos and painted Minervas walling their eyes in speechless rapture before the garish lights of the grand opera? How the fans and ribbons fluttered and the side-whiskers swayed and spluttered amid the inscrutable harmonies of Wagner! That was the tuneless pandemonium of urban music. Did you ever watch the bulls and bears of finance turn the stock exchange into a howling wilderness of confusion in the struggle to raise or lower prices? That was the third heaven of artificial pleasure and excitement in the city. But what is a thrill of victory in the gambling hell of frenzied finance compared with the joy a fisherman feels down on the farm when a game trout strikes his baited hook in the darkening eddy of a crystal stream and the good reel sings as he gives him line and the fishing rod bends and the waters splash? What is the gilded club room where the wizards of finance meet to sip and smoke and shuffle the cards of fortune compared with a fisherman’s tent and a fisherman’s luck on the bank of a moonlit river where hearts are trumps and souls overflow with song and story? Did you ever hear the tale of Mark Antony, the funeral orator of Rome and the Romeo of the Nile? He went angling in Egypt one day on the royal barge with the beautiful Cleopatra and he fished and fished and fished, unrewarded by a nibble, until the hours grew dull and heavy. But the cunning queen conceived a plan to change her lover’s luck and unfolded the scheme to a slave; and the slave secretly dived from the larboard side of the boat and hung a dried herring on the General’s hook and then gave his line a vigorous pull. “By Jupiter!” shouted Mark Antony, “I have hooked a monstrous fish.” “Take care, my lord, and give him line lest he drag thee into the sea,” cried the dark-eyed queen, as she chuckled behind her fan.