s noon now, the fish had stopped biting
after the wayward fashion of bass, he was hungry and thirsty and he
would go up and see the little girl and the giant again and get that
promised dram. Once more, however, he let his minnow float down into the
shadow of a big rock, and while he was winding in, he looked up to
see in the road two people on a gray horse, a man with a woman behind
him--both old and spectacled--all three motionless on the bank and
looking at him: and he wondered if all three had stopped to ask his name
and his business. No, they had just come down to the creek and both they
must know already.

"Ketching any?" called out the old man, cheerily.

"Only one," answered Hale with equal cheer. The old woman pushed back
her bonnet as he waded through the water towards them and he saw that
she was puffing a clay pipe. She looked at the fisherman and his tackle
with the naive wonder of a child, and then she said in a commanding
undertone.

"Go on, Billy."

"Now, ole Hon, I wish ye'd jes' wait a minute." Hale smiled. He loved
old people, and two kinder faces he had never seen--two gentler voices
he had never heard.

"I reckon you got the only green pyerch up hyeh," said the old man,
chuckling, "but thar's a sight of 'em down thar below my old mill."
Quietly the old woman hit the horse with a stripped branch of elm and
the old gray, with a switch of his tail, started.

"Wait a minute, Hon," he said again, appealingly, "won't ye?" but calmly
she hit the horse again and the old man called back over his shoulder:

"You come on down to the mill an' I'll show ye whar you can ketch a
mess."

"All right," shouted Hale, holding back his laughter, and on they went,
the old man remonstrating in the kindliest way--the old woman silently
puffing her pipe and making no answer except to flay gently the rump of
the lazy old gray.

Hesitating hardly a moment, Hale unjointed his pole, left his minnow
bucket where it was, mounted his horse and rode up the path. About him,
the beech leaves gave back the gold of the autumn sunlight, and a little
ravine, high under the crest of the mottled mountain, was on fire
with the scarlet of maple. Not even yet had the morning chill left the
densely shaded path. When he got to the bare crest of a little rise,
he could see up the creek a spiral of blue rising swiftly from a stone
chimney. Geese and ducks were hunting crawfish in the little creek that
ran from a milk-house of logs, ha