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Sitting over her father's peat-fire one night gossiping with him about fishing-flies and tackle, I noticed the grieve, who had dropped in by appointment with some ducks' eggs on which Bell's clockin hen was to sit, performing some sleight-of-hand trick with his coat-sleeve. This he gravely slipped into the hands of the maid of his choice, and then took his departure, apparently much relieved.
The Waverley Novels On returning, in 1810, from an excursion to the Islands of the western Scottish coast, where he had been collecting impressions for "The Lord of the Isles," Scott was searching one morning for fishing-flies in an old desk at Ashestiel, when he came across a forgotten manuscript, written and abandoned five years before. It contained the first two chapters of "Waverley."
He not only devised his own fishing-flies, wove his own shad-nets, and game-baskets, but performed the duties of a ship-carpenter whenever his boats got out of order, or a new one was wanted for the river. On the day of Lina's great sorrow, Ben was standing in front of the boat-house, superintending a kettle of pitch that was boiling over a fire of dried logs and bark.
Sitting over her father's peat-fire one night gossiping with him about fishing-flies and tackle, I noticed the grieve, who had dropped in by appointment with some ducks' eggs on which Bell's clockin' hen was to sit, performing some sleight-of-hand trick with his coat-sleeve. This he gravely slipped into the hands of the maid of his choice, and then took his departure, apparently much relieved.
Coryston duly arrived, a more disreputable figure than usual bedraggled with rain, his shabby trousers tucked into his boots, and his cap festooned with fishing-flies; for the afternoon had turned showery, and Coryston had been pursuing the only sport which appealed to him in the trout-stream of the park. Before he did so he had formally asked leave of the agent, and had been formally granted it.
May did not interfere, the daughters saw that the abstinence was an effort of prudence, and were proportionately disturbed when one day at dinner, in his father's absence, Aubrey, who had been overlooking his fishing-flies with some reviving interest, refused all his sisters' proposals for the afternoon, and when they represented that it was not a good fishing-day, owned that it was not, but that he was going over to consult Leonard Ward about some gray hackles.
He was gapy and fidgetty, and prosy and dosy, kept a tool chest and a medicine chest, weighed out manna and magnesia, constructed fishing-flies, and nets for fruit-trees, turned nutmeg-graters, lined his wife's work-box, and dressed his little daughter's doll; and had a tone of conversation perfectly in keeping with his tastes and pursuits, abundantly tedious, thin, and small.
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