On Dec 5, 1:12 pm, "Wolfgang" wrote:
FISHIN' JIMMY
By Annie Trumbull Slosson

Charles Scribner's Sons, 1902
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PART I

It was on the margin of Pond Brook, just back of Uncle Eben's that I first
saw Fishin' Jimmy. It was early June, and we were again at Franconia, that
peaceful little village among the northern hills.

The boys, as usual, were tempting the trout with false fly or real worm, and
I was roaming along the bank, seeking spring flowers, and hunting early
butterflies and moths. Suddenly there was a little plash in the water at
the spot where Ralph was fishing, the slender tip of his rod bent, I heard a
voice cry out, "Strike him, sonny, strike him!" and an old man came quickly
but noiselessly through the bushes, just as Ralph's line flew up into space,
with, alas! no shining, spotted trout upon the hook. The new comer was a
spare, wiry man of middle height, with a slight stoop in his shoulders, a
thin brown face, and scanty gray hair. He carried a fishing-rod, and had
some small trout strung on a forked stick in one hand. A simple, homely
figure, yet he stands out in memory just as I saw him then, no more to be
forgotten than the granite hills, the rushing streams, the cascades of that
north country I love so well.

We fell into talk at once, Ralph and Waldo rushing eagerly into questions
about the fish, the bait, the best spots in the stream, advancing their own
small theories, and asking advice from their new friend. For friend he
seemed even in that first hour, as he began simply, but so wisely, to teach
my boys the art he loved. They are older now, and are no mean anglers, I
believe; but they look back gratefully to those brookside lessons, and
acknowledge gladly their obligations to Fishin' Jimmy. But it is not of
these practical teachings I would now speak; rather of the lessons of simple
faith, of unwearied patience, of self-denial and cheerful endurance, which
the old man himself seemed to have learned, strangely enough, from the very
sport so often called cruel and murderous. Incomprehensible as it may seem,
to his simple intellect the fisherman's art was a whole system of morality,
a guide for every-day life, an education, a gospel. It was all any poor
mortal man, woman, or child, needed in this world to make him or her happy,
useful, good.

At first we scarcely realized this, and wondered greatly at certain things
he said, and the tone in which he said them. I remember at that first
meeting I asked him, rather carelessly, "Do you like fishing?" He did not
reply at first; then he looked at me with those odd, limpid, green-gray eyes
of his which always seemed to reflect the clear waters of mountain streams,
and said very quietly: "You would n't ask me if I liked my mother--or my
wife." And he always spoke of his pursuit as one speaks of something very
dear, very sacred. Part of his story I learned from others, but most of it
from himself, bit by bit, as we wandered together day by day in that lovely
hill-country. As I tell it over again I seem to hear the rush of mountain
streams, the "sound of a going in the tops of the trees," the sweet, pensive
strain of white-throat sparrow, and the plash of leaping trout; to see the
crystal-clear waters pouring over granite rock, the wonderful purple light
upon the mountains, the flash and glint of darting fish, the tender green of
early summer in the north country.

Fishin' Jimmy's real name was James Whitcher. He was born in the Franconia
Valley or northern New Hampshire, and his whole life had been passed there.
He had always fished; he could not remember when or how he learned the art.
From the days when, a tiny, bare-legged urchin in ragged frock, he had
dropped his piece of string with its bent pin at the end into the narrow,
shallow brooklet behind his father's house, through early boyhood's season
of roaming along Gale River, wading Black Brook, rowing a leaky boat on
Streeter or Mink Pond, through youth, through manhood, on and 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 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 fur-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 laves 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, tailing 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 stain; the cedar-bird, with its
smooth brown coat of Quaker simplicity, and speech as brief and simple as
Quaker yea or nay; the winter-wren sending out his strange, lovely, liquid
warble from the high, rocky side of Cannon Mountain; the bluebird of the
early spring, so welcome to the winter-weary dwellers in that land of ice
and snow, as he

"From the bluer deeps
Lets fall a quick, prophetic strain,"

of summer, of streams freed and flowing again, of waking, darting, eager
fish; the veery, the phoebe, the jay, the vireo,--all these were friends,
familiar, tried and true to Fishin' Jimmy. The cluck and the coo of the
cuckoo, the bubbling song of bobolink in buff and black, the watery trill of
the stream-loving swamp-sparrow, the whispered whistle of the stealthy,
darkness-haunting whippoorwill, the gurgle and gargle of the
cow-bunting,--he knew each and all, better than did Audubon, Nuttall, or
Wilson. But he never dreamed that even the tiniest of his little favorites
bore, in the scientific world, far away from that quiet mountain nest, such
names as Troglodytes hyemalis or Melospiza palustris. He could tell you,
too, of strange, shy creatures rarely seen except by the early-rising,
late-fishing angler, in quiet, lonesome places: ...

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Back in the sixties and seventies my grandmother spent her summers in a
cottage at Pinestead Farms in Franconia, right at the base of Cannon
Mountain. The Gale River flows through the property. Beautiful country,
and a good read.