And who that has enjoyed this one little hour of success would consider the purchase as dearly made? Is it with bait that you are angling?--and in the solitude of a mountain glen can you discover the stream of your hope, stretching away like a blue pennant waving into the distance, and escaping from view behind some projecting angle of the hill? Your fishing-rod is tight and right, your line is in order, your hook penetrates your finger to the barb; other companions than the plover, the lark, and the water-wagtail you have none. This is no hour for chirping grasshopper, or flaunting butterfly, or booming bee; the overshaded and ruffled water receives your bait with a plump; and ere it has travelled to the distance of six feet, it is nailed down to the leeward of a stone. You pull recklessly and fearlessly, and flash after flash, and flap after flap, comes there in upon your hull the spotted and ponderous inmate of the flood! Or is it the fly with which you are plying the river's fuller and more seaward flow? The wide extent of streamy pool is before you, and beyond your reach. Fathom after fathom goes reeling from your pirn, but still you are barely able to drop the far fly into the distant curl. "Habet!" he has it; and proudly does he bear himself in the plenitudes of strength, space, and freedom. Your line cuts and carves the water into all manner of squares, triangles, and parallelograms. Now he makes a few capers in the air, and shows you, as an opera dancer would do, his proportions and agility: now again he is sulky and restive, and gives you to understand that the _vis inertiæ_ is strong within him. But fate is in all his operations, and his last convulsive effort makes the sand and the water commingle at the landing-place. The resort of the fisher is amidst the retirements of what, and what alone, can be justly denominated undegraded nature. The furnace, and the manufactory, and the bleaching-green, and the tall red smoke-vomiting chimney are his utter aversion. The village, the clachan, the city, he avoids: he flies from them as something intolerably hostile to his hopes. He holds no voluntary intercourse with man, or with his petty and insignificant achievements. "He lifts his eyes to the hills," and his steps lie through the retired glen, and winding vale, and smiling strath, up to the misty eminence and cairn-topped peak. He catches the first beams of the sun, not through the dim and disfiguring smoke of a city, but over the sparkling and diamonded mountain, above the unbroken and undulating line of the distant horizon. His conversation is with heaven, with the mist, and the cloud, and the sky; the great, the unmeasured, the incomprehensible are around him; and all the agitation and excitement to which his hopes and fears as a mere fisher subject him, cannot completely withdraw his soul from that character of sublimity by which the mountain solitude is so perceptibly impressed.