BORROWED LINES

"I borrow no man's tackle."—"Frank Forester."

Nature.—"Solitude has its charm and its reward and Nature offers to mankind the proper blessings, be they indulged in with care and consideration. The mind that has been oppressed by following civilization's rut will find ample comfort in the solitude given man by Nature."—R. P. L., The Sportsmen's Review.

Save the Fishes.—"We who love wild life and long ago abandoned the many instruments of extermination and who have come to a more considerate mode of recreation should do all in our power to discourage its destruction and to encourage the propagation of the wild life which has been so generously and graciously given us by our Creator. Only extremists insist on terrible slaughter of fishes, birds, and quadrupeds."—E. M. Hermann.

"Improvement."—"No building enterprise, no 'betterment' ever spares a tree. Insects and lack of care kill what 'improvement' leaves."—New York Evening World, Aug. 18, 1914.

Jesus the Fisherman.—"Had not the Saviour of Gennesaret understood fishermen's signs, such as the riff on the water, the schooling of the fishes, the hovering gulls, there would have been no miraculous catch of fishes."—Charles Hallock.

Society where None Intrudes.—"I had pined so much, in the dust and heat of the great town, for trees and fields, and running waters, and the sounds of country life, and the air of country winds, that never more could I grow weary of these soft enjoyments."—Blackmore, Lorna Doone.

The Call of the Wild.—"Lying hidden away in the back of the brain is the primitive longing for adventure and the tingle of the nerves that awaits it. Under the veneer of what is called civilization lie the racial and elemental passions, just as Mother Earth lies beneath the asphalted streets of the city."—Adele M. Ballard.

Gold Fishing.—"When all green places have been destroyed in the builder's lust of gain; when all the lands are but bricks and piles of wood and iron; when there is no moisture anywhere and no rain ever falls; when the sky is a vault of smoke and all the rivers reek with poison; when forest and stream, the moor and meadow and all the old green wayside beauty are things vanished and forgotten; when every gentle, timid thing of brake and bush, of air and water, has been killed because it robbed them of a berry or a fruit; when the earth is one vast city, whose young children behold neither the green of the field nor the blue of the sky, and hear no song but the hiss of the steam, and know no music but the roar of the furnace; when the old sweet silence of the countryside, and the old sweet sounds of waking birds, and the old sweet fall of summer showers, and the grace of a hedgerow bough, and the glow of the purple heather, and the note of the cuckoo and cushat, and the freedom of waste and of woodland and all things are dead and remembered of no man; then the world, like the Eastern king, will perish miserably of famine and of drought, with gold in its stiffened hands, and gold in its withered lips and gold everywhere; gold that the people can neither eat nor drink, gold that cares nothing for them, but mocks them horribly; gold for which their fathers sold peace, and health, and holiness, and beauty; gold that is one vast grave."—Ouida.

Heaven.—"My heart is fixed firm and stable in the belief that ultimately the sunshine and the summer, the flowers and the azure sky, shall become, as it were, interwoven into man's existence. He shall take from all their beauty and enjoy their glory."—Richard Jefferies, The Life of the Fields.

Modern Savagery.—"Civilization is a nervous disease."—Clarence King.

Humanity.—"Reading and writing are not educational, unless they make us feel kindly towards all creatures."—Ruskin.

Walton's Depth.—"In Walton's angling works a child may wade and a giant swim."—John Ryan.

"I shall stay ... [the reader] no longer than to wish him a rainy evening to read this ... Discourse; and that, if he be an honest Angler, the East wind may never blow when he goes a-Fishing."—Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler, 1653.

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