FIRE ISLAND ANA;*

OR

A WEEK AT THE FIRE ISLANDS.

FROM THE UNPUBLISHED JOURNAL OF A SPORTSMAN.

CHAPTER I.

It was during an Indian-summer week of hearty, brown October, that Oliver Paul, Ned Locus, and I, once made a shooting party, and drove Ned's sorrel mares to Jim Smith's, at Scio, and thence bent canvass for the Fire Islands, to try the brant.

Before going on with my story, it may, perhaps, be dutiful in me, and desirable on behalf of people who have never studied geography, to specify the condition of the said Islands. We will accomplish this cheerful office, straightway. In brief, then, they made their first appearance in the country, after a hard earthquake, some five or six hundred years ago, on the

* PRIVATE NOTE TO THE EDITORS.-Good sirs: I cannot deny to you the right to require a declaration of the identities of the place, and persons, touching which I have heretofore told familiar anecdotes in your monthly; since, you say, scandal is afloat, and the wrong men are pointed at. I give you, therefore, herewith part of the andro-and-geo-graphy solicited. Should you hear any thing more, please address me, through the post-office, to the care of my uncle, Jeremiah Cypress, porter of the Pearl-street Bank.

southern coast of Matowacs, latitude forty degrees and forty minutes north; longitude, seventy-three degrees and one minute west; near the occidental end of Raccoon beach. They are two in number, and contain in the whole, at low water, about fifty acres of marsh and mud, disposed with irregular and careless grace, and scalloped into jutting points and circling bays. The principal inhabitants are gulls, and meadow-hens. The climate is saline and salubrious. The chief products of the soil are, sedge-grass, birds' eggs, and clams. Yet, not unknown to "human face divine,” nor ignorant of the lofty enterprise, and gentle mercies, of trade, do those points and bays lie profitless. For, there John Alibi salutes the fading morning star, and the coming sun, with the heavy vollies of his yet cherished flint lock muskets; and the tumbling wild fowl, splashing into the midst of his stool, bleed out their murdered lives, while he, reloading, counts the profits of his eager shot, and sees, with his mind's eye, the gasping victims already picked, and stalled in Fulton market. Hence, live and flourish, all the little Alibis; and hence, the princess widow, gentle mistress of the soil, rejoices in a welcome rev

enue.

Brother sportsmen, let me introduce to your judicious affection, my friend and comrade, Oliver Paul.-Oliver, the people. He is a plain unpretending tiller, and a lord, moreover, of the land; a Quaker, you see-regular Hicksite—and like all friends that I ever yet knew, he is sometimes wet and sometimes dry. Still, he is semper idem-always the sameand has been such for fifty years-in hot, and in cold—in total abstinence, and in generous imbibition. As Oliver is warm-hearted, I love him; as he is a good shot, I honor him ; and as he can pull a discreet oar, foretell, to a certainty, where the wind is going to be on the morrow, and mark down

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a crippled bird more truly than any man in the republic, I always get him to go with me upon my shooting expeditions. Oliver has but few eccentric qualities. His religion is as the religion of Hicksites"in general:" his philosophy is comprised in the sententious apothegm, which is applied upon all occasions and occurrences, some pork will boil that way:" his morals; he is a bachelor, and though of a most unmatrimonial composition, he is incessantly talking of taking a wife, or, as he terms it, "flying in" with a woman. Though from principle, and the rules of his creed, opposed to both national and individual wars, yet, strike him, and he will not turn to you his other cheek, for a repetition of the temptation. He may not strike back, but as they do at yearly meeting, when friends cannot agree upon the choice of a clerk-he will most certainly shove you, as he would say, "like rotten." His most characteristic trait is his superintendence of the morals and manners of his neighbors. So bountiful is his benevolence, that to protect the reputation of a friend, he scruples not to unlace and scarify his own. Walk out with him, and meet a ruddy-cheeked Rosina, with a coquettish eye, that puts the very devil into you, "don't look, don't look, boys," he'll cry, and dig his elbows into your side to enforce obedience to the precept, while he himself is staring into her face, until the morning-tint vermilion of her virgin-blushes is lost in the scarlet-and-and-confusion-and-somebody finish that;-and then, he'll drain the last drop of liquor from the jug, for the sole, charitable purpose of preserving his brother sportsman's nerves steady. You know him now, and I have nothing more to say, except to warn you, as a friend, if you should ever be out with him in the bay, on a cold November day, on short allowance, watch your fluids.

Ned Locus.-Ned is a young gentleman, who spends his

money, and shoots, and fishes, and tells tough yarns for a living. His uncle manages his estate, for although Ned is now of age, yet he don't want to deprive the old man of the commissions; and, besides, ever since Ned got his bachelor's diploma, he has forgotten his Greek and Trigonometry, without which, no man can be an executor. Ned, although not strictly pious, delights not in things of this world. Mere terrestrial axioms know no lodgement in his confidence. His meditations and labors are in another sphere, an universe of his own creation. And yet, he believes himself to be a plain, practical, matter-of-fact man; one who has no fancy, who never tells his dreams for truths, nor adds a single bird or fish in the story of the sum total of his successes. There is no design, upon his part, in the choice of his place of existence, or the description of his sensations and actions. The fault, if any, lies in his original composition; his father and mother are to be blamed for it, not he. His eyes and ears are not as the eyes and ears of other men, and, truly, so is not his tongue. There is an investiture of unearthliness about every thing he sees and hears. By day, and by night, he is contemplating a constant mirage. He never admired a woman on account of her having flesh, blood, bosom, lips, and such things; but, while he gazed, he worshipped some fairy incarnation, that enveloped and adorned her with unearthly grace, and hypercelestial sweetnesses. Even in his reading he is an original. He never gives to a fine passage in Shakespeare its ordinary interpretation; but the brilliant light of the poet's thought, is crooked, and thrown off, and sometimes made a caricature rainbow of, by the refraction of his cloudy imagination. His aunt sent him, one new-year's day, when he was at college, an old copy of the Septuagint, which she had picked up at the auction sale of the effects of a demised ecclesiastic. On re

ceiving the present, he wrote upon the fly-leaf, what he considered to be the apposite sentiments of Mark Antony

"Let but the commons hear this testament,

Which, pardon me, I do not mean to read ;”

That was Ned, all over. With such a constitution, it is quite possible that he may seem, to those men who always want the actual proof of a thing, chapter and verse, to be rather given to romance. Ned hates such people. So do I. They are without faith, earth-bound, and live by sense alone, grossly.

I am-I don't know what I am, exactly. I'm a distant relative of Ned,—a blossom off one of the poor branches of the family. I "expect" I'm a kind of a loafer. I'm Ned's friend, and he's mine. I'm his moralist, and minister, and tiger, and kind of tutor, and he lends me money. I certainly intend to repay him; though I don't owe him much now, by the by, for I have won all the bets we have made lately, as might naturally be presumed-Ned always bets so wildly. We keep along pretty square. Ned's a good fellow. If I only say, "Ned, I'm rather short, to-day, how are you?" he'll give me a draft on his uncle, for a cool hundred. We play picquet, too, now and then, and cassino, and all-fours, a little. I can beat him at those games. I keep my account at the Tea-water Pump. I have thought of getting into some kind of business, —I think I am calculated for it; but my affection for Ned will not permit me to leave him. We were both "licked" by Joe Nelson, the blind schoolmaster, and hectored by his twinheaded understrapper; and we were classmates in old Columbia, and put into practice the doctrines of forces, and action and reaction at Robinson's, during intermission hours, and were always together. So we ride about and take our comfort.