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Show LEVIATHAN saound. I don't 'low there is eny devil, but ef ther' wuz, guess that's the kind o' fight 'd make him grin." This opinion appeared to reach down to the fundamental saving grace of humour in the Samaritan mind. The vestry persuaded the Reverend Willibert that the time was not yet ripe for candles; and the board of deacons induced the Reverend Cotton Mather to substitute a course of lectures on the Women of the Bible for the stereopticon exhibitions. Hostilities gently frothed themselves away and subsided. Decoration Day was celebrated in Samaria, according to the Hitchfield Gazette, "by a notable gathering in the Town Hall, at which the Rev. Jones offered an eloquent extemporaneous prayer and the Rev. Hopkins pronounced an elegant oration on. the Civil War, after which the survivors partook of a banquet at the Hancock Hotel." But the rivalry between the two leaders, sad to say, did not entirely disappear with the peaceful reconciliation and commingling of their forces. On the contrary, it was as if a general engagement had been abandoned and both the opposing companies had resolved themselves into the happy audience of 286 LEVIATHAN a single combat. It was altogether a friendlr and chivalrous contest, you understand,-nothing bitter or malicious about it,-but none the less it was a duel a l' autrance, a struggle for the masterr between two men whom nature had made rivals, and for whom circumstances had prepared the arena in the double sphere of love and angling. Hopkins had become known, during the seven years of his residence at Samaria, as the best troutfisherman of the village, and indeed of all the tributary region. With the black bass there were other men who were his equals, and perhaps one or two, like Judge Ward, who spent the greater part of his summer vacation sitting under an umbrella in a boat on Lake Marapaug, and Jags Witherbee, the village ne'er-do-wee), who were his superiors. But with the delicate, speckled, evasive trout he was easily first. He knew all the cold, foaming, musical brooks that sang their way down from the hills. He knew the spring-holes in the Lirrapaug River where the schools of fish assembled in the month of May, waiting to go up the brooks in the warm weather. He knew the secret haunts and lairs of the large fish where they 287 J I |
