he done it kinder makes fish an’ fishin’ diffunt from any other thing in the hull airth.  I tell ye them four books that gin his story is chock full o’ things that go right to the heart o’ fishermen,—­nets, an’ hooks, an’ boats, an’ the shores, an’ the sea, an’ the mountings, Peter’s fishin’-coat, lilies, an’ sparrers, an’ grass o’ the fields, an’ all about the evenin’ sky bein’ red or lowerin’, an’ fair or foul weather.

“It ’s an out-doors, woodsy, country story, ‘sides bein’ the heav’nliest one that was ever telled.  I read the hull Bible, as a duty ye know.  I read the epis’les, but somehow they don’t come home to me.  Paul was a great man, a dreffle smart scholar, but he was raised in the city, I guess, an’ when I go from the gospils into Paul’s writin’s it ‘s like goin’ from the woods an’ hills an’ streams o’ Francony into the streets of a big city like Concord or Manch’ster.”

The old man did not say much of his after life and the fruits of this strange conversion, but his neighbors told us a great deal.  They spoke of his unselfishness, his charity, his kindly deeds; told of his visiting the poor and unhappy, nursing the sick.  They said the little children loved him, and everyone in the village and for miles around trusted and leaned upon Fishin’ Jimmy.  He taught the boys to fish, sometimes the girls too; and while learning to cast and strike, to whip the stream, they drank in knowledge of higher things, and came to know and love Jimmy’s “fishin’ r’liging.”  I remember they told me of a little French Canadian girl, a poor, wretched waif, whose mother, an unknown tramp, had fallen dead in the road near the village.  The child, an untamed little heathen, was found clinging to her mother’s body in an agony of grief and rage, and fought like a tiger when they tried to take her away.  A boy in the little group attracted to the spot, ran away, with a child’s faith in his old friend, to summon Fishin’ Jimmy.  He came quickly, lifted the little savage tenderly, and carried her away.

No one witnessed the taming process, but in a few days the pair were seen together on the margin of Black Brook, each with a fish-pole.  Her dark face was bright with interest and excitement as she took her first lesson in the art of angling.  She jabbered and chattered in her odd patois, he answered in broadest New England dialect, but the two quite understood each other, and though Jimmy said afterward that it was “dreffle to hear her call the fish pois’n,” they were soon great friends and comrades.  For weeks he kept and cared for the child, and when she left him for a good home in Bethlehem, one would scarcely have recognized in the gentle, affectionate girl the wild creature of the past.  Though often questioned as to the means used to effect this change, Jimmy’s explanation seemed rather vague and unsatisfactory. “’T was fishin’ done it,” he said; “on’y fishin’; it allers works.  The Christian r’liging itself had to begin with fishin’, ye know.”