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Page 44
"You speak for yourself, Dickey," said Mr. Crumlish good-naturedly.
"There's some of us that goes in and comes out, with nobody to care
which it is, nor how long we stay; but freedom has its drawbacks, as
well as other things."
The schoolmaster laughed at himself for striking a match as he turned
the last light out, but he felt moving through his brain a vague wish
that Uncle Jabez would break himself of that trick he had of gazing
fixedly at nothing, and that other trick of stopping suddenly in the
middle of a sentence to cock his head, as if he were hearing some
far-away, uncertain sound.
MARGARET VANDEGRIFT.
FISHING IN ELK RIVER.
When a man has once absorbed into his system a love for fishing or
hunting, he is under the influence of an invisible power greater than
that of vaccine matter or the virus of rabies. The sporting-fever is the
veritable malady of St. Vitus, holding its victim forever on the go, as
game-seasons come, and so long as back and legs, eye and ear, can
wrestle with Time's infirmities. It breeds ambition, boasting, and
"yarns" to a proverbial extent, with a general disbelief in the possible
veracity of a brother sportsman, and an irresistible; desire to talk of
new and privately discovered sporting-heavens. The gold-seeker stakes
his claim, the "wild-catting" oil-borer boards up his lot, the inventor
patents his invention, and the author copyrights his brain-fruit; but
the sportsman crazily tells all he knows. So the secret gets out, and
the discoverer is robbed of his treasure and forced to seek new fields
for his rod and gun.
Colonel Bangem had enjoyed a year's sport among the unvisited preserves
of Elk River. Mrs. Bangem and Bess, their daughter, had shared his
pleasures and acquired his fondness for such of them as were within
feminine reach. Any ordinary man would have been perfectly satisfied
with such company and delights; but no, when the bass began to leap and
the salmon to flash their tails, the pressure was too great. His friends
the Doctor and the Professor were written to, and summoned to his find.
They came, the secret was too good to keep, and that is the way this
chronicle of their doings happens to be written.
No sooner was the invitation received than the Doctor eased his
conscience and delighted his patients by the regular professional
subterfuge of sending such of them as had money to the sea-shore, and
telling those who had not that they needed no medicine at present; the
Professor turned his classes over to an assistant on pretext of a sudden
bronchial attack, for which a dose of mountain-air was the prescribed
remedy. And so the two were whirled away on the Chesapeake and Ohio
Railroad across the renowned valley of Virginia and the eastern valley
steps of the Alleghany summits, past the gigantic basins where boil and
bubble springs curative of all human ills, down the wild boulder-tossed
waters and magnificent ca�ons of New River, around mountain-bases,
through tunnels, and out into the broad, beautiful fertility of the
Kanawha Valley, until the spires of Charleston revealed the last stage
of their railroad journey. When their train stopped, stalwart porters
relieved them of their baggage and deafened them with self-introductions
in stentorian tones: "Yere's your Hale House porter!" "I's de man fer
St. Albert's!"
"It's no wonder," said the Doctor, as he followed the sable guide from
the station to the river ferry, and looked across the Kanawha's busy
flow, covered with coal-barges, steamboats, and lumber-crafts, to
Charleston's long stretch of high-bank river front, "that Western rivers
get mad and rise against the deliberate insult of all the towns and
cities turning their backs to them. There is a mile of open front,
showing the cheerful faces of fine residences through handsome
shade-trees and over well-kept lawns; but here, where our ferry lands,
and where we see the city proper, stoops and kitchens, stove-pipes and
stairways, ash-piles and garbage-shoots, are stuck out in contempt of
the river's charms and the city's comeliness."
"Stove-pipes and stairways have to be put somewhere," said the
matter-of-fact Professor. "And the best way to turn dirty things is
toward the water."
The ferry-boat wheezed and coughed and sidled across the river to a
floating wharf, covered, as usual, with that portion of the population,
white and black, which has no interest in the arrival of trains, or
anything else, excepting meals at the time for them, but which manages
to live somehow by looking at other people working.
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