Fishermans Luck | Page 5

affair of gift, not of wages. Fish (and the other good things which
are like sauce to the catching of them) cast no shadow before. Water is
the emblem of instability. No one can tell what he shall draw out of it
until he has taken in his line. Herein are found the true charm and profit
of angling for all persons of a pure and childlike mind.
Look at those two venerable gentlemen floating in a skiff upon the
clear waters of Lake George. One of them is a successful statesman, an
ex-President of the United States, a lawyer versed in all the curious
eccentricities of the "lawless science of the law." The other is a learned
doctor of medicine, able to give a name to all diseases from which men
have imagined that they suffered, and to invent new ones for those who
are tired of vulgar maladies. But all their learning is forgotten, their
cares and controversies are laid aside, in "innocuous desuetude." The
Summer School of Sociology is assembled. The Medical Congress is in
session.
But they care not--no, not so much as the value of a single live bait.
The sun shines upon them with a fervent heat, but it irks them not. The
rain descends, and the winds blow and beat upon them, but they are
unmoved. They are securely anchored here in the lee of Sabbath-Day
Point.
What enchantment binds them to that inconsiderable spot? What magic
fixes their eyes upon the point of a fishing-rod, as if it were the finger
of destiny? It is the enchantment of uncertainty: the same natural magic
that draws the little suburban boys in the spring of the year, with their
strings and pin-hooks, around the shallow ponds where dace and
redfins hide; the same irresistible charm that fixes a row of city gamins,
like ragged and disreputable fish-crows, on the end of a pier where

blear-eyed flounders sometimes lurk in the muddy water. Let the
philosopher explain it as he will. Let the moralist reprehend it as he
chooses. There is nothing that attracts human nature more powerfully
than the sport of tempting the unknown with a fishing-line.
Those ancient anglers have set out upon an exodus from the tedious
realm of the definite, the fixed, the must-certainly-come-to-pass. They
are on a holiday in the free country of peradventure. They do not know
at this moment whether the next turn of Fortune's reel will bring up a
perch or a pickerel, a sunfish or a black bass. It may be a hideous
catfish or a squirming eel, or it may be a lake-trout, the grand prize in
the Lake George lottery. There they sit, those gray-haired lads, full of
hope, yet equally prepared for resignation; taking no thought for the
morrow, and ready to make the best of to-day; harmless and happy
players at the best of all games of chance.
"In other words," I hear some severe and sour-complexioned reader say,
"in plain language, they are a pair of old gamblers."
Yes, if it pleases you to call honest men by a bad name. But they risk
nothing that is not their own; and if they lose, they are not
impoverished. They desire nothing that belongs to other men; and if
they win, no one is robbed. If all gambling were like that, it would be
difficult to see the harm in it. Indeed, a daring moralist might even
assert, and prove by argument, that so innocent a delight in the taking
of chances is an aid to virtue.
Do you remember Martin Luther's reasoning on the subject of
"excellent large pike"? He maintains that God would never have
created them so good to the taste, if He had not meant them to be eaten.
And for the same reason I conclude that this world would never have
been left so full of uncertainties, nor human nature framed so as to find
a peculiar joy and exhilaration in meeting them bravely and cheerfully,
if it had not been divinely intended that most of our amusement and
much of our education should come from this source.
"Chance" is a disreputable word, I know. It is supposed by many pious
persons to be improper and almost blasphemous to use it. But I am not
one of those who share this verbal prejudice. I am inclined rather to
believe that it is a good word to which a bad reputation has been given.
I feel grateful to that admirable "psychologist who writes like a
novelist," Mr. William James, for his brilliant defence of it. For what

does it mean, after all, but that some things happen in a certain way
which might have happened in another way? Where is the immorality,
the irreverence, the atheism in such a supposition?