McTeague would keep to this road
until he reached the city again by the way of the Sacramento Street car
line. The dentist loved these walks. He liked to be alone. He liked the
solitude of the tremendous, tumbling ocean; the fresh, windy downs; he
liked to feel the gusty Trades flogging his face, and he would remain
for hours watching the roll and plunge of the breakers with the silent,
unreasoned enjoyment of a child. All at once he developed a passion for
fishing. He would sit all day nearly motionless upon a point of rocks,
his fish-line between his fingers, happy if he caught three perch in
twelve hours. At noon he would retire to a bit of level turf around an
angle of the shore and cook his fish, eating them without salt or knife
or fork. He thrust a pointed stick down the mouth of the perch, and
turned it slowly over the blaze. When the grease stopped dripping, he
knew that it was done, and would devour it slowly and with tremendous
relish, picking the bones clean, eating even the head. He remembered
how often he used to do this sort of thing when he was a boy in the
mountains of Placer County, before he became a car-boy at the mine. The
dentist enjoyed himself hugely during these days.
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