Winter, you would say, would be but a dreary season for the two old cronies, since it would put a stop to their voyaging, and, by confining them within doors, would make them impish and melancholy. But you are wrong, if you say so. There were nets and lines to make and to mend, and the past to recount, and the future to reckon upon; and Phil would play on his fiddle while Zed would sing, and when Phil's arm was weary with scraping, and Zed's throat was sore with piping, Zed would listen till he fell asleep with Phil telling ghost-stories and fairy-tales, and love-ditties and robber-ventures,—all of which he had learned from his godmother, old Abigail Cullsimple, at once the most famous herb-woman, midwife, and tale-teller, in her own day and generation, for threescore miles round about ancient Torksey on the Trent,—nay, it were perilous to assert that she ever had an equal, in these three combined qualifications, throughout the whole region of Lindsey. It would take some thousands of pages to narrate half the adventures in rain and fair weather, of the fisherman and fiddler, during their threescore years of friendship. Let it suffice to take up their life-story for some two or three days of the last summer they spent together in this world, commencing with a fine morning in which they unmoored their little boat somewhat earlier than usual, in order to reach Littleborough for a wedding, before the turn of the tide. The morning was such a delicious one, that, old as they were, the two old voyagers could not restrain their feeling of pleasure at the balmy and refreshing effect it had upon their weather-beaten frames; and, blind as poor Phil was, you could not have failed, had you seen his expressive face when under very pleasurable emotion, to discern that it scarcely needs the language of eyes to demonstrate the heart's happiness. Their little skiff darted like a fowl along the stream, so finely did opening nature seem to nerve the old men's arms, and puff their little sail; the very fishes seemed scarcely to have time to take alarm while the oars plashed amid the liquid silver, but darted and gambolled after each other,—the rapid dace and the delicate bleak, and the golden-finned perch,—every moment to the surface of the stream, exulting, as it seemed, in the solar glory. It was a morning to fill with music every human soul that has any music in itself. The sweet matin lute of the lark thrilled through the heavens, and the still sweeter voice of the blythe milk-maid, as she tripped it, fresh and rosy, over the lea, was heard waking the echoes with her plaintive love-melody. Zed and Phil were too true children of Nature to disobey her influences, and thus chanted their hearts' sedate joy, as they bent at the oar:— "Merrily we go, my man— Merrily with the tide! Catch the breezes while you can— Here we'll not abide!