FISHIN’ JIMMY

It was on the margin of Pond Brook, just back of Uncle Eben’s, that I first saw Fishin’ Jimmy.  It was early June, and we were again at Franconia, that peaceful little village among the northern hills.

The boys, as usual, were tempting the trout with false fly or real worm, and I was roaming along the bank, seeking spring flowers, and hunting early butterflies and moths.  Suddenly there was a little plash in the water at the spot where Ralph was fishing, the slender tip of his rod bent, I heard a voice cry out, “Strike him, sonny, strike him!” and an old man came quickly but noiselessly through the bushes, just as Ralph’s line flew up into space, with, alas! no shining, spotted trout upon the hook.  The new comer was a spare, wiry man of middle height, with a slight stoop in his shoulders, a thin brown face, and scanty gray hair.  He carried a fishing-rod, and had some small trout strung on a forked stick in one hand.  A simple, homely figure, yet he stands out in memory just as I saw him then, no more to be forgotten than the granite hills, the rushing streams, the cascades of that north country I love so well.

We fell into talk at once, Ralph and Waldo rushing eagerly into questions about the fish, the bait, the best spots in the stream, advancing their own small theories, and asking advice from their new friend.  For friend he seemed even in that first hour, as he began simply, but so wisely, to teach my boys the art he loved.  They are older now, and are no mean anglers, I believe; but they look back gratefully to those brookside lessons, and acknowledge gladly their obligations to Fishin’ Jimmy.  But it is not of these practical teachings I would now speak; rather of the lessons of simple faith, of unwearied patience, of self-denial and cheerful endurance, which the old man himself seemed to have learned, strangely enough, from the very sport so often called cruel and murderous.  Incomprehensible as it may seem, to his simple intellect the fisherman’s art was a whole system of morality, a guide for every-day life, an education, a gospel.  It was all any poor mortal man, woman, or child, needed in this world to make him or her happy, useful, good.

At first we scarcely realized this, and wondered greatly at certain things he said, and the tone in which he said them.  I remember at that first meeting I asked him, rather carelessly, “Do you like fishing?” He did not reply at first; then he looked at me with those odd, limpid, green-gray eyes of his which always seemed to reflect the clear waters of mountain streams, and said very quietly:  “You would n’t ask me if I liked my mother—­or my wife.”  And he always spoke of his pursuit as one speaks of something very dear, very sacred.  Part of his story I learned from others, but most of it from himself, bit by bit, as we wandered together day by day in that lovely hill-country.  As I tell it over again I seem to hear the rush of mountain streams, the “sound of a going in the tops of the trees,” the sweet, pensive strain of white-throat sparrow, and the plash of leaping trout; to see the crystal-clear waters pouring over granite rock, the wonderful purple light upon the mountains, the flash and glint of darting fish, the tender green of early summer in the north country.