Fishin Jimmy | Page 2

on into old age, his life had
apparently been one long day's fishing--an angler's holiday. Had it been
only that? He had not cared for books, or school, and all efforts to tie
him down to study were unavailing. But he knew well the books of
running brooks. No dry botanical text-book or manual could have
taught him all he now knew of plants and flowers and trees.

He did not call the yellow spatterdock Nuphar advena, but he knew its
large leaves of rich green, where the black bass or pickerel sheltered
themselves from the summer sun, and its yellow balls on stout stems,
around which his line so often twined and twisted, or in which the hook
caught, not to be jerked out till the long, green, juicy stalk itself, topped
with globe of greenish gold, came up from its wet bed. He knew the
sedges along the bank with their nodding tassels and stiff lance-like
leaves, the feathery grasses, the velvet moss upon the wet stones, the
sea-green lichen on boulder or tree-trunk. There, in that corner of Echo
Lake, grew the thickest patch of pipewort, with its small, round,
grayish-white, mushroom-shaped tops on long, slender stems. If he had
styled it Eriocaulon septangulare, would it have shown a closer
knowledge of its habits than did his careful avoidance of its vicinity,
his keeping line and flies at a safe distance, as he muttered to himself,
"Them pesky butt'ns agin!" He knew by sight the bur-reed of mountain
ponds, with its round, prickly balls strung like big beads on the stiff,
erect stalks; the little water-lobelia, with tiny purple blossoms,
springing from the waters of lake and pond. He knew, too, all the
strange, beautiful under-water growth: bladderwort in long, feathery
garlands, pellucid water-weed, quillwort in stiff little bunches with
sharp-pointed leaves of olive-green,--all so seldom seen save by the
angler whose hooks draw up from time to time the wet, lovely tangle. I
remember the amusement with which a certain well-known botanist,
who had journeyed to the mountains in search of a little plant, found
many years ago near Echo Lake, but not since seen, heard me propose
to consult Fishin' Jimmy on the subject. But I was wiser than he knew.
Jimmy looked at the specimen brought as an aid to identification. It
was dry and flattened, and as unlike a living, growing plant as are
generally the specimens from an herbarium. But it showed the
awl-shaped leaves, and thread-like stalk with its tiny round seed-vessels,
like those of our common shepherd's-purse, and Jimmy knew it at once.
"There's a dreffle lot o' that peppergrass out in deep water there, jest
where I ketched the big pick'ril," he said quietly. "I seen it nigh a foot
high, an' it 's juicier and livin'er than them dead sticks in your book." At
our request he accompanied the unbelieving botanist and myself to the
spot; and there, looking down through the sunlit water, we saw great
patches of that rare and long-lost plant of the Cruciferse known to

science as Subularia aquatica. For forty years it had hidden itself away,
growing and blossoming and casting abroad its tiny seeds in its watery
home, unseen, or at least unnoticed, by living soul, save by the keen,
soft, limpid eyes of Fishin' Jimmy. And he knew the trees and shrubs so
well: the alder and birch from which as a boy he cut his simple, pliant
pole; the shad-blow and iron-wood (he called them, respectively,
sugarplum and hard-hack) which he used for the more ambitious rods
of maturer years; the mooseberry, wayfaring-tree, hobble-bush, or
triptoe,--it has all these names, with stout, trailing branches, over which
he stumbled as he hurried through the woods and underbrush in the
darkening twilight.
He had never heard of entomology. Guenee, Hubner, and Fabricius
were unknown names; but he could have told these worthies many new
things. Did they know just at what hour the trout ceased leaping at dark
fly or moth, and could see only in the dim light the ghostly white miller?
Did they know the comparative merits, as a tempting bait, of
grasshopper, cricket, spider, or wasp; and could they, with bits of wool,
tinsel, and feather, copy the real dipterous, hymenopterous, or
orthopterous insect? And the birds: he knew them as do few
ornithologists, by sight, by sound, by little ways and tricks of their own,
known only to themselves and him. The white-throat sparrow with its
sweet, far-reaching chant; the hermit-thrush with its chime of bells in
the calm summer twilight; the vesper-sparrow that ran before him as he
crossed the meadow, or sang for hours, as he fished the stream, its
unvarying, but scarcely monotonous little strain; the cedar-bird, with its
smooth brown coast of Quaker simplicity, and speech