Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 September 1885 — GOING A-FISHING. [ARTICLE]

GOING A-FISHING.

BY LIGE BROWN.

Some people would rather stay at home and handle money than go fishing, Lut I am not so constructed. Money, of course, has occasional attractions, even to a man who lives mainly on moonshine; but there frequently comes a time when I am overcome with a desire to go where pellucid waters gurgle, and lor a day or two relapse into barbarism and eat with my fingers. As Sam Jones I am down on piscatorial diversions, but, brethren, I do love to fish. I never baited a hook in my life, if we rule out the pin-hook period of existence; but for all that, I love to lie in the shade on a hot -day, and watch somebody else having good luck and a splendid time. Any man who has the use of a brain that is always on the go, like a young chicken in quest of bugs, will find that not ing so lulls it into the holy calm of perfect repose, so necessary at occasional intervals to robust mental health, as reclining in a hammock in the breezy ■shade on a hot day and watching somebody trying to catch fish. The eyes may remain open, and ilie body wide awake, but the soul will slumber, and when aroused to duty afterward it will spring up refreshed. One of the ways to get all the enjoyment of the circus, without tho crowd and bad breath you are obliged to endure in order to harvest hilarity under canvas, is to make up a little party of friends, and go forth in picnic stylo to spend a day killing mosquitoes and eating pickles and jelly on the bank of some placid stream, where it meanders through a forest which drapes the earth in cooling shadows so intense that ants on the biscuit are not observed. I have in mind an excursion of that kind which occurred this season. A ■small party of kindred spirits was made up, and a day appointed for the picnic. It was agreed that everybody should take something, so I took a camp cot •and a fan, in addition to a fiy lemonade before starting. Others, more keensighted, took substantial that came handy in the course of the day, but nobody had the foresight to think of bait. Bait is the allurement placed on the hook to beguile the fish to its ruin, and is a matter of some consequence, if you expect to have good luck and catch many fish, though some are foolish enough to bite at the bare htfok, as you sometimes see people do in real life. My wife took a freezer 6f ice cream, a jug of milk, and every precaution to get her refreshments to the rendezvous in safety. She also took a lady guest from the city who was afraid of snakes and something of a gusher on poetry. It might also be remarked that she had a good mouth for pie and abhorred a Pig-. We started early. My costume was cool but impressive. It consisted largely of blue cotton pantaloons," straw hat, and a shirt without a collar. I also wore a cigar the greater part of the time, in addition to the blue goggles which are my constant stay and comfort in hot weather. The women were dressed with scrupulous care in Mother Hubbards, widebrimmed hats, and full-grown umbrellas. Our coupe for the time was a lumbering spring wagon, drawn by a Boise who resembled myself in one marked particular. He was fond of •the shade, and narrowly escaped upsetding the wagon several times in his ’frantic efforts to get to it when we ,passed a tree by the roadside. Immediately on leaving home my ■wife began to enjoy herself and add to 'the pleasure of the company—which was myself and the woman who abhorred snakes—by worrying about the cream and its chance of getting there in anything short of a sloppy condition. It, is a peculiarity of this good woman to take an interest in everything she has anything to do with. LHer ihler'est in that cream was con-, ttinuoua and full of solicitude. The ’ »;• \

journey was about six miles, and from notches cut on the wagon-box by way of memoranda—for I like to be accurate about such matters for the sake of argument afterward—l discover that I was obliged to atop, alight, and overhaul the tub in which the freezer and jug of milk were packed in the fragments of an iceberg of no insignificant size, fifty-three consecutive times, in response to the calls of that woman’s abnormal zeal toward promoting the pleasure of the party in the sizzing hours of the day. About the time I w®uld get back into the wagon and become comfortably fixed in my seat, she would begin to brood on terrible consequences sure to happen a little farther along, and it wouldn’t be a minute until she would be about ready to break down with a presentiment that the cork had already come out of the jug. So I would have to climb down again, and prove by personal observation that she was wrong, as is generally the casein the clash of intellect between man and wife, but it was not until we finally drove into camp, and she had satisfied herself by overhauling the cooling apparatus in person that my numerously repeated statements were correct as usual, that anything like tranquillity of mind or placidity of demeanor was possible to the woman who had such an important responsibility resting on her delicate shoulders. Most of the party were equipped with poles and lines, and expected to dip a hook for the fun of the thing, but two men had come to fish in the literal meaning of the term, and after spending an hour in scouring the country in search of bait, they secured a limited supply, and, finding a place where the sun could pour down on them without hindrance, they spit on their hooks and commenced business in scientific earnest. I took a position on my cot in the thickest shade I could find, and prepared to enjoy myi elf without unnecessary fatigue. In fifteen minutes the camp was thrown into most intense excitement. The red headed man had a bite! Everybody held his breath and stood on tiptoe to wait the result. It weighed three pounds, according to a rumor that diffused itself through the community next day, but if you insist on scriptural accuracy in such matters, divide by three and let it go at that. Of course the lucky man was not troubled with solitude for some time afterward. Everybody else brought his pole and got as close to him as possible. His society was in demand Irom that moment, but he lost his luck and his jaw dropped until the solemn-faced man’s cork began to bob. The crowd then went over to him in a body, and his hopes were blasted. The man with the flaming ringlets pulled out another bass, and the crowd stampeded back to him. The sad-faced man readjusted his bait, spit on his hook, tossed it back into the water, and sat motionless for two hours. Just as I was beginning to feel myself borne by angel hands to the land of dreams, a new diversion aroused me. It was a female shriek of most robust amplitude and unmistakable earnestness, followed by a rush of air near me, and a resounding splash in the water that threw a cloud of spray several feet above the river’s bank. A female shriek is something to which I generally pay more or less attention, depending somewhat as to xvliom the shriekist may happen to be. When it happens to be the companion of my woes, as it generally is, I never excite myself with precipitate rashness. I take things cool and look around for something on which to base a conjecture before sweating myself without urgent cause. When a man has had his blood brought to a standstill more times than a six-year-old can count, by a wail from the wife q£ liis bosom over nothing more terrible than the unexpected appearance of a spider, or at most a mouse, he will learn to keep his coat on and wait for developments of a more dreadful nature. When the screamer is young and fair, and has taffy-colored hair banged in both hemispheres, it alters the case, and I go to the rescue at once, without caring a noodle for particulars.

When the aforesaid shriek struck me my first impression was that the partner of my triumphs had made the awful discovery that the cream jug was corkless in spite of all my efforts in its behalf, but a moment later I saw that I was mistaken. The gusher from the city had sat down on a log and was trying to compose a poem to nature when she espied a small snake, and at onco became so demoralized with fear that she instantly become as crazy as her own poetry, and jumped into the river for want of knowing what else to do. Being the only man in the party at leisure at that moment, of course I had to jump in and pull her out. The complexion of the poetess and my own raiment were a good deal the worse for the ducking, but it took all the nonsense out of Tier for the remainder of the day, and I had reason to feel grateful to the serpent who had slaughtered tho muse, for the misguised woman had somehowbecome impressed with the delusion that the greatest pleasure I could know was in listening to the reading of her own sad, sweet melodies. By this time the solemn-faced man came into camp, looked at a dinner basket and sighed. Whether this signal had been previously agreed upon or not, I don’t know, but at all events the women took the hint and began to spread out the dinner, having some time before commenced the preparation of coffee on a small ooal-oil stove in a very large boiler. The stove had seemed discouraged , from the start at the size of the' job, and took its own time to bring the water to the boiling point. Everybody stood around watching the coffee and wondering why

it didn’t boiL I suggested that matters might be hurried a little by hanging the boiler on the limb of a tree and getting the red-haired man to stand under it, but he didn’t seem to take kindly to the proposition and it was not adopted. When it was discovered that the light in the Btove had died out probably an hour before and somebody had put a chunk of ice in the boiler, the wisdom of my view was at once apparent. It was also strengthened in due course of investigation by the revelation that the stove was like the lamp of a foolish virgin, and no one had thought to bring a cruse of oil for its encouragement An old-fashioned fire was then set going by the sad-eyed man, who had served in the army and knew more about cooking than his own mother or anybody else’s wife, and in a very little while the odor of good cheer pervaded the camp. The table was spread on the ground, and we squatted about it in Oriental fashion. If you don’t believe that man is still a savage at every favorable opportutunity, go with him to a picnic and watch him eat. The bottled-up instincts of a thousand generations of life in cave and forest break out in him. then, and for the time the polish of education is observed. He don’t care a fly for appearances, and has no use for a knife and fork. He dives in with both hands, and keeps his mouth too full to talk until everything in reach has disappeared, and then he begins to forage on adjacent territory, and steals pie from the near-sighted woman at his elbow. If my gifts were of the kind that find expression in marble, and I wanted to picture famine in permanent form, I would sculp the sclemn-faced man as he looked with a roast chicken in one hand, a little of everything else in the other, and a good deal of miscellaneous nutriment piled up in front of hint) a l * he ,sat with a stony stare straight ahead, and jaws going it like a quartz-crusher in a busy season. The picture will long occupy a well-lighted nook in memory as about the most energetic tableau of earnestness I ever stumbled against. I very much doubt whether the sad-eyed man would have quit eating chicken at that minute to listen to good preaching. The red-haired man was also busy, but his face contained rather too much of sunlight to make him available for allegorical purposes of a dreadful character. Though he probably managed to conceal from view more provender than any one else in the party, there was nothing so very depressing in the sight of him as he did it. He looked as if he enjoyed the feast, and didn’t act as though he was doing it on a bet, but managed somehow to keep his conversational works and laughing machinery going at the same time his masticating apparatus was & most hurried operation. If you want to have a good time at a picnic, you will miss it if you don’t take a sorrel-top along. A woman is always a woman, but more especially so at a picnic dinner. In the unequal race of life the fragile creature may not be able to hold her own at all times, but she does it at meal time, no matter where she is or who is present. I don’t mean to say that she gets her full share of the eatables, in the strict sense of the word, but she maintains the characteristics of her sex, and never for one instant forgets that she is dressed in petticoats. When a man gets beyond the restraints of a draw-ing-room he ceases to be a human being, and gnaws a bone with as much delight as a jackal; but on the other side of the house it is different. A woman never forgets that she has a complexion that should be guarded or a tongue that can gallop unbridled wherever it will. Instead of grabbing everything that comes handy, and puttifig it out of sight as soon as possible, without any>regard to whether her face is frescoed with jelly, her nose blossoming with jam, or her cheeks glowing through butter, she minces a morsel of this, bfeaks off a piece of that, takes a mere taste of the other, and tries just the smallest fragment of something else, saying all the while how dreadfully soggy her own cake is, as she knew it would be, and told Henry so a dozen times befoi'e they started, and how deliciously good everybody else’s provender is, and what a shame it is she should have spoiled the feast by bringing a lot of trash nobody will eat.; but then she might have known it, for she never did have any luck with this, that, or the other when she was hurried. And so it goes. Every woman runs down her own truck as the vilest of the vile, and lauds that of everybody else to the highest pinnacle of perfection. And did anybody ever see such heavenly this, or such ecstatic that, and for mercy’s sake did anybody ever see anything so grand as something else, and how in this world was it ever made—so splendid every way; do tell, Mrs. Topnotch, .for goodness’ cake? And pshaw! you don’t say! that’s exactly the way she made it herself; but did anybody ever see such a scandalous difference? And while all the feminine tongues are rattling in their strategic effortn to pull in compliments, the men eat up everything in sight except the custard pie Claybank’s baby fell into face down, and every woman on the ground goes home hungry that night, and one of these days will most likely tell somebody in confidence there wasn’t a thing fit to eat except what she took harself, and of course that was eaten up at once by those wretched men before she could get a taste.—Chicago Ledger. He who suffers keenly has great capacity for enjoyment. There is no keen , sense of delight except to ouq who has I a keen flense of sorrow.