FullReads

Note: {3} Written before the Volunteer movement.

‘And perhaps, too, that similar want of a high sense of honour, which seems, from the religious periodicals, to pervade a large proportion of a certain more venerable profession?’

‘Seriously, Claude, I believe you are not far wrong. But we are getting on delicate ground there: however I have always found, that of whatever profession he may be–to travestie Shakspeare’s words, –

“The man that hath not sporting in his soul, Is fit for treason’s direst stratagems” –

and so forth.’

‘Civil to me!’

‘Oh, you have a sporting soul in you, like hundreds of other Englishmen who never handled rod or gun; or you would not be steering for Exmoor to-day. If a lad be a genius, you may trust him to find some original means for developing his manly energies, whether in art, agriculture, science, or travels, discovery, and commerce. But if he be not, as there are a thousand chances to one he will not be, then whatever you teach him, let the two first things be, as they were with the old Persians, “To speak the truth, and to draw the bow.”‘

By this time we had reached the stream, just clearing from the last night’s showers. A long transparent amber shallow, dimpled with fleeting silver rings by rising trout; a low cascade of green-veined snow; a deep dark pool of swirling orange-brown, walled in with heathery rocks, and paved with sandstone slabs and boulders, distorted by the changing refractions of the eddies,–sight delicious to the angler.

I commenced my sport at once, while Claude wandered up the glen to sketch a knoll of crags, on which a half-wild moorland pony, the only living thing in sight, stood staring and snuffing at the intruder, his long mane and tail streaming out wildly against the sky.

I had fished on for some hour or two; Claude had long since disappeared among the hills; I fancied myself miles from any human being, when a voice at my elbow startled me

‘A bleak place for fishing this, sir!’

I turned; it was an old grey-whiskered labouring man, with pick and spade on shoulder, who had crept on me unawares beneath the wall of the neighbouring deer-cover. Keen honest eyes gleamed out from his brown, scarred, weather-beaten face; and as he settled himself against a rock with the deliberate intention of a chat, I commenced by asking after the landlord of those parts, well known and honoured both by sportsman and by farmer.

‘He was gone to Malta–a warmer place that than Exmoor.’

‘What! have you been in Malta?’

Yes, he had been in Malta, and in stranger places yet. He had been a sailor: he had seen the landing in Egypt, and heard the French cannon thundering vainly from the sand-hills on the English boats. He had himself helped to lift Abercrombie up the ship’s side to the death-bed of the brave. He had seen Caraccioli hanging at his own yard-arm, and heard (so he said, I know not how correctly) Lady Hamilton order out the barge herself, and row round the frigate of the murdered man, to glut her eyes with her revenge. He had seen, too, the ghastly corpse floating upright, when Nelson and the enchantress met their victim, returned from the sea-depths to stare at them, as Banquo’s ghost upon Macbeth. But she was ‘a mortal fine woman, was Lady Hamilton, though she was a queer one, and cruel kind to the sailors; and many a man she saved from flogging; and one from hanging, too; that was a marine that got a-stealing; for Nelson, though he was kind enough, yet it was a word and a blow with him; and quite right he, sir; for there be such rascals on board ship, that if you ain’t as sharp with them as with wild beastesses, no man’s life, nor the ship’s neither, would be worth a day’s purchase.’