Anglers seem to me to be
the only sportsmen who really have a taste for and love of nature as
well as for fishy water. At any rate, the silent, solitary, and
comparatively still character of their pursuit enables them to study and
appreciate beauty of scenery more than the violent exercise and
excitement of fox-hunting, whatever may be said in favor of the
picturesque influences of beating preserves and wading through
turnip-fields with keepers and companions more or less congenial.
Of deer-stalking and grouse-shooting I do not speak; a man who does not
become enthusiastic in his admiration of wild scenery while following
these sports must have but half the use of his eyes.
Perhaps it was hardly fair to expect my father to relish extremely a
residence where he was as nearly as possible too high and too wide, too
long and too large, for every room in the house. He used to come down on
Saturday and stay till Monday morning, but the rest of the week he spent
at what was then our home in London, No. 5 Soho Square; it was a
handsome, comfortable, roomy house, and has now, I think, been converted
into a hospital.
The little cottage at Weybridge was covered at the back with a vine,
which bore with the utmost luxuriance a small, black, sweet-water grape,
from which, I remember, one year my mother determined to make wine; a
direful experiment, which absorbed our whole harvest of good little
fruit, filled every room in the house with unutterable messes, produced
much fermentation of temper as well as wine, and ended in a liquid
product of such superlative nastiness, that to drink it defied our
utmost efforts of obedience and my mother's own resolute courage; so it
was with acclamations of execration made libations of--to the infernal
gods, I should think--and no future vintage was ever tried, to our great
joy.
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