e done as well.

After a quarter of a mile of this I ventured a remark--"Jonathan, you
have often told me of the delights of dawn fishing." Jonathan was
extricating his line from an alder bush, and did not answer. I could not
resist adding, "I _think_ you said that the trout--bit--at dawn."
Continued silence warned me that I had said enough, and I tactfully
changed the subject: "What I am sorry for is the birds' nests up in
those fields. How do the eggs ever hatch--in ice water! And how do the
strawberries ever ripen, in cold storage every night--ugh! Let's go back
and get some hot coffee and go to bed!"

And that is my one experience with dawn fishing. But Jonathan, reacting
from the experience with the temper of the true enthusiast, still
maintains that trout do bite at dawn. Perhaps they do. But for me, no
more early-dewy meadows, except to look at.

Those hours of dawn fishing were the hardest work I did during the week.
A lazy week, in truth, and an irresponsible one. Every one who can
should snatch such a week and see what it does for him. In some ways it
was better than camping, because camping, unless you have guides, is
undoubtedly hard work, especially if you keep moving--work that one
would never grudge, yet hard work nevertheless. The omitting of the
night camp cut out practically all the work and made it more
comfortable for the horse, while our noon camps made us independent all
day, and gave us that sense of being at home outdoors that one never
gets if one has to run to cover for every meal.

And, curiously enough, the spots that seem homelike to me, as I linger
in memory among the scenes of that week, are not the places where we
spent the nights, pleasant though they were, but rather the spots where
we built our little fireplaces. Each was for an hour our
hearth-fire,--our own,--and I do not forget them,--some beside the open
road, one on a ridge where the sun slants across as it goes down among
purpling hills; one in the deep woods, by a little trout brook, where
the sound of running water never ceases; one in an open grove by the
river we love best, where a tiny brook with brown pools full of the
shadowy trout empties its cold waters into the big, warm current.
Perhaps no one else may notice them, but they are there, waiting for us,
if haply we may pass that way again. And if we do, we shall surely pause
and give them greeting.

IV

The Yellow Valley

We were on our way to the Yellow