all been swept down to the salt loch--_in medio tutissimus ibis_--ay, now you feel she begins to fail--the butt tells now every time you deliver your right. What! another mad leap! yet another sullen plunge! She seems absolutely to have discovered, or rather to be an impersonation of the Perpetual Motion. Stand back out of the way, you son of a sea-cook--you in the tattered blue breeches, with the tail of your shirt hanging out. Who the devil sent you all here, ye vagabonds?--Ha! Watty Richie, my man, is that you? God bless your honest laughing phiz! What Watty, would you think of a Fish like that about Peebles? Tam Grieve never gruppit sae heavy a ane since first he belanged to the Council. Curse that colley! Ay! well done Watty! Stone him to Stobbo. Confound these stirks--if that white one, with caving horns, kicking heels, and straight up tail, come bellowing by between me and the river, then, “Madam! all is lost, except honour!” If we lose this Fish at six o’clock, then suicide at seven. Our will is made--ten thousand to the Foundling--ditto to the Thames Tunnel-ha--ha--my beauty! Methinks we could fain and fond kiss thy silver side languidly lying afloat on the foam, as if all farther resistance now were vain, and gracefully thou wert surrendering thyself to death No faith in female--she trusts to the last trial of her tail--sweetly workest thou, O Reel of Reels! and on thy smooth axle spinning sleep’st, even, as Milton describes her, like our own worthy planet. Scrope--Bainbridge--Maule--princes among Anglers--oh! that you were here! Where the devil is Sir Humphrey? At his retort? By mysterious sympathy--far off at his own Trows, the Kerss feels that we are killing the noblest Fish, whose back ever rippled the surface of deep or shallow in the Tweed. Tom Purdy stands like a seer, entranced in glorious vision, beside turreted Abbotsford. Shade of Sandy Givan! Alas! alas! Poor Sandy--why on thy pale face that melancholy smile!--Peter! The Gaff! The Gaff! Into the eddy she saüs, sick and slow, and almost with a swirl--whitening as she nears the sand--there she has it--struck right into the shoulder, fairer than that of Juno, Diana, Minerva, or Venus--fair as the shoulder of our own beloved, and lies at last in all her glorious length and breadth of beaming beauty, fit prey for giant or demi-god angling before the Flood! “The child is father of the man, And I would wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety!” So much for the Angler. The Shooter again, he begins with his pop or pipe gun, formed of the last year’s growth of a branch of the plane-tree--the beautiful dark-green-leaved and fragrant-flowered plane-tree, that stands straight in stem and round in head, visible and audible too from afar the bee-resounding umbrage, alike on stormy sea-coast and in sheltered inland vale, still loving the roof of the fisherman’s or peasant’s cottage.