The Brattleboro reformer. (Brattleboro, Vt.) 1907-1912, 1909-05-21
GOING FISHING.
The Only Backward Road from Man
hood to BOyhOOd

NOOu W DoyuoOU.
The trout fishing season which will be
ON this week suggests rev thoughts.
Most of them old ones, but everything
connected with trout fishing is forever
new, writes j. E. Harris in the Hardwicll
Gazette. The same old story, with fresh
variations will be gone through. Old men
frequently tell in a hopeless and reminis-
cent way of being boy again." but
nothing under the blue dome of the limit
less ether will actually accomplish it ex-
cept day on trout brook. Then the
man of any age goes back into boyhood
Trout i1shlng Is not recreation nor a
sport IN the sense that other things are.
1t is something in the nature of a hyp-
notlc trance, transformation, a dream.
When the brook is reached, time is at an
end. The world with its cares and wor-
RES recedes and fades away 1t is as a
tale that is told. Time ends and eternity
begins.
How hardly earned and longed for and
lntrequent were the half days off in those
tar gone years when the boy was at last
permitted to go fishing! The final little
Jobs and chores were done in hurry, the
bait was hastily dug out behind the barn,
and with cheap cotton line, couple of
treasured hooks and a roll of sheet lead
for "sinkers' bee line was made for the
nearest brook. Not step was taken to
the right or left and not moment was
wasted Every second not spent in fish
ing was time worse than lost Arriving
at the bank of the paradise regained for
only such little while a pole was hastily
cut from the nearest clump of aders or
other suitable growth, the line was at
tached, hooks tied on, small section of
the lead foil wrapped around the line
near the hook to steady it, and an obsti-
natek wriggling worm was impatiently
impalad Then the boy entered into
dreamland
With good luck, poor luck or no luck
at all, he fshed The minutes and the
hours f1oated by until the boy suddenly
awakened to dreary sense of the realities
of life. The sun was sinking and home
was long way off. With a sigh of throb-
hing regret he cut off the pole just below
the wound string, showed the relic into
his pocket and tried to get home in time
to help do the chores. as he had promised
On the issue of the fulhllment of that
promise depended his being allowed to go
again during the entire season
Forty years after the same boy goes
again to the same brook. There is no ia
ther then to remind him of chore time,
there is no mother to watch him hurry
ing across the fields The old farmhouse
- S'lt VI NldHStu. 'NOlnc NDpuS are cut
off and some are grown up on the old
place, and the boy looks about him with
the sense of a great void somewhere. Al
though there is no father and mother to
control his hours, although he has a nice
new fshpole now, there seems to be
something indefnable which is broken or
out of Joint or lost out of his life. The
world has grown old and unsympathetic
and chilly, and Just over there where he
so vividly of once seeing a
beautiful rainbow is now only bank of
cold and gloomy clouds.
But he knows web where that brook is,
and the nearest way to it. And he takes
the same old once familiar way to the
brookside. He look, at it and listens to
it, and the weight of the years begin to
Slip from his shoulders. The brook whis-
pers and gurgles to him that it has never
forgotten him, that it has been watching
and waiting for him all these years. re-
faithful to the early friendship
and waiting while the shadows longer
grow. The boy again thrills with the in
finite charm of the old days as he hurried
" prepares his outfit and begins.
The hours come and 90, while the dream
: on him. Two score years are as
watch in the night while the course of
inc has run backward by the mighty