Sparse Grey Hackle (Alfred W. Miller) 1954

iller was a one-time Wall Street reporter who also contributed to Sports Illustrated and Outdoor Life. His writing has all the precision of a financial reporter, but fortunately for us, it is combined with great charm, and Sparse could write on just about any subject and make it fun to read. Fishless Days is best known for its extended memoir of Theodore Gordon and the Catskill flyfishers who knew him, but there are some great tales to be read here and it is one of those books which should never have been allowed to go out of print.

'Murder' is probably the best known story in the book and it has been reprinted countless times in anthologies, but some of best cameos aren't even about fishing. My favourite bit of Miller's writing is in the chapter called 'Chance Meetings.' I've never been able to work out whether the passage is just came naturally to him, or whether he was just showing off what he could do with words that the rest of us find so difficult to tame:

The Singers. It was a time of gloom and sorrow, for the disaster at Pearl Harbour and the hopeless plight of our troops on Bataan cast down our spirits. The military had refused me firmly and there was little I could do to help, so I went fishing, as I could after I discovered that a 1940 Ford would run on unrationed kerosene.
Thus it was that early one Saturday morning in August my wife and I, on our way to the Beaverkill, encountered on the forward deck of the Newburgh ferryboat a group of men enjoying the rising sun and cool breeze on their way to work in the war plants across the Hudson.
Clad in scrubbed, faded blue bib overalls and blue denim shirts, they were middle-aged men with gray hair and comfortable waistlines but with wide shoulders too and strong, calloused hands. One of them reminded me of my Uncle Frank, who had the front of a buffalo and a handlebar moustache all across his broad Saxon face; who could lift anything he could get a good hold of, and, besides, made the most marvelous wooden guns for my cousin and me to hunt deer and bears all along the fencerows of the old farm.
They did not mind being up early or going to work on a Saturday, those men, but joked and laughed together, and I think they must have been members of some singing society or chorus, for several times during the long trip they broke into snatches of harmony of which they sang but a few bars each time before lapsing into mirth and banter.
The ferryboat came into the slip and made fast. The gates went up. Then suddenly one of them raised a strong baritone voice.
"Onward Christian soldiers..." he sang, and the others came in with a heart-stopping crash:
"MARCHING AS TO WAR!"
On the instant they were all in step, pounding their heels on the planking and swinging their tin dinner pails in unison to the greatest marching song ever written.
Through the cavernous, echoing ferry shed and out onto the cobbles of the old river town they went, still singing, in an irregular formation that somehow reminded me of skirmishers going forward under fire. As I eased the car past them, the one who looked like Uncle Frank stopped singing a moment and smiled as he saw the rod cases stacked in the back of the car.
"Good luck," he said, and I seemed to hear Uncle Frank add, "Olford," as he used to pronounce my name in the old-fashioned country way.
My heart was uplifted, and suddenly all was made clear to me.
"They'll never beat us; never!" I exclaimed. "Men like that made America great; men like that will keep her great."
And so they did.