“But remember, boy,” he said, with his
shrewd smile, “never brag of catching a fish
until he is on dry ground. I’ve seen older
folks doing that in more ways than one, and so making
fools of themselves. It ’s no use to boast
of anything until it ’s done, nor then either,
for it speaks for itself.”
How often since I have been reminded of the fish that
I did not catch! When I hear people boasting
of a work as yet undone, and trying to anticipate
the credit which belongs only to actual achievement,
I call to mind that scene by the brookside, and the
wise caution of my uncle in that particular instance
takes the form of a proverb of universal application:
“Never brag of your fish before you catch him.”
“Here’s to budgets,
packs, and wallets; Here’s to all the wandering
train.”
Burns.
I confess it, I am keenly sensitive to “skyey
influences.” I profess no indifference
to the movements of that capricious old gentleman known
as the clerk of the weather. I cannot conceal
my interest in the behavior of that patriarchal bird
whose wooden similitude gyrates on the church spire.
Winter proper is well enough. Let the thermometer
go to zero if it will; so much the better, if thereby
the very winds are frozen and unable to flap their
stiff wings. Sounds of bells in the keen air,
clear, musical, heart-inspiring; quick tripping of
fair moccasined feet on glittering ice pavements;
bright eyes glancing above the uplifted muff like
a sultana’s behind the folds of her yashmac;
schoolboys coasting down street like mad Greenlanders;
the cold brilliance of oblique sunbeams flashing back
from wide surfaces of glittering snow or blazing upon
ice jewelry of tree and roof. There is nothing
in all this to complain of. A storm of summer
has its redeeming sublimities,—its slow,
upheaving mountains of cloud glooming in the western
horizon like new-created volcanoes, veined with fire,
shattered by exploding thunders. Even the wild
gales of the equinox have their varieties, —sounds
of wind-shaken woods and waters, creak and clatter
of sign and casement, hurricane puffs and down-rushing
rain-spouts. But this dull, dark autumn day
of thaw and rain, when the very clouds seem too spiritless
and languid to storm outright or take themselves out
of the way of fair weather; wet beneath and above;
reminding one of that rayless atmosphere of Dante’s
Third Circle, where the infernal Priessnitz administers
his hydropathic torment,—
“A
heavy, cursed, and relentless drench,—
The
land it soaks is putrid;”
