I can just remember an old brown-coated man who was the Walton of this stream, who had come over from Newcastle, England, with his... son,--the latter a stout and hearty man who had lifted an anchor in his day. A straight old man he was, who took his way in silence through the meadows, having passed the period of communication with his fellows; his old experienced coat, hanging long and straight and brown as the yellow pine bark, glittering with so much smothered sunlight, if you stood near enough, no work of art but naturalized at length. I often discovered him unexpectedly amid the pads and the gray willows when he moved, fishing in some old country method,--for youth and age then went a-fishing together,--full of incommunicable thoughts, perchance about his own Tyne and Northumberland. He was always to be seen in serene afternoons haunting the river, and almost rustling with the sedge; so many sunny hours in an old man's life, entrapping silly fish; almost grown to be the sun's familiar; what need had he of hat or raiment any, having served out his time, and seen through such thin disguises? I have seen how his coeval fates rewarded him with the yellow perch, and yet I thought his luck was not in proportion to his years; and I have seen when, with slow steps and weighed down with aged thoughts, he disappeared with his fish under his low-roofed house on the skirts of the village. I think nobody else saw him; nobody else remembers him now, for he soon after died, and migrated to new Tyne streams. His fishing was not a sport, nor solely a means of subsistence, but a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world, just as the aged read their Bibles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Turn 'em loose.... Wherever they go, they'll be on my land. My land. We're here and we're gonna stay here. Gimme ten years and I'l...l have that brand on the gates of the greatest ranch in Texas. The big house'll be down by the river, the corrals and the barns behind it. It'll be a good place to live in. Ten years and I'll have the Red River "D" on more cattle than you've looked at anywhere. I'll have that brand on enough beef to feed the whole country. Good beef for hungry people. Beef to make 'em strong, to make 'em grow. But it takes work, it takes sweat, and it takes time, lots of time. It takes years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ol' man river, dat ol' man river, He must know sumpin', but don't say nothin'... He just keeps rollin', He keeps on rollin' along.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To be an editor, as I was. Then to lie here close by the river over the place... Where the sewage flows from the village, And the empty cans and garbage are dumped, And abortions are hidden.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We occasionally rested in the shade of a maple or a willow, and drew forth a melon for our refreshment, while we contemplated at o...ur leisure the lapse of the river and of human life; and as that current, with its floating twigs and leaves, so did all things pass in review before us, while far away in cities and marts on this very stream, the old routine was proceeding still. There is, indeed, a tide in the affairs of men, as the poet says, and yet as things flow they circulate, and the ebb always balances the flow. All streams are but tributary to the ocean, which itself does not stream, and the shores are unchanged, but in longer periods than man can measure. Go where we will, we discover infinite change in particulars only, not in generals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »