during the long summer noons, and felt for
the trout under their banks. A holiday was a holiday indeed that
brought permission to go fishing over on Rose's Brook, or up
Hardscrabble, or in Meeker's Hollow; all-day trips, from morning till
night, through meadows and pastures and beechen woods, wherever the
shy, limpid stream led. What an appetite it developed! a hunger that
was fierce and aboriginal, and that the wild strawberries we plucked as
we crossed the hill teased rather than allayed. When but a few hours
could be had, gained perhaps by doing some piece of work about the farm
or garden in half the allotted time, the little creek that headed in
the paternal domain was handy; when half a day was at one's disposal,
there were the hemlocks, less than a mile distant, with their
loitering, meditative, log-impeded stream and their dusky, fragrant
depths. Alert and wide-eyed, one picked his way along, startled now and
then by the sudden bursting-up of the partridge, or by the whistling
wings of the "dropping snipe," pressing through the brush and the
briers, or finding an easy passage over the trunk of a prostrate tree,
carefully letting his hook down through some tangle into a still pool,
or standing in some high, sombre avenue and watching his line float in
and out amid the moss-covered boulders. In my first essayings I used to
go to the edge of these hemlocks, seldom dipping into them beyond the
first pool where the stream swept under the roots of two large trees.
From this point I could look back into the sunlit fields where the
cattle were grazing; beyond, all was gloom and mystery; the trout were
black, and to my young imagination the silence and the shadows were
blacker. But gradually I yielded to the fascination and penetrated the
woods farther and farther on each expedition, till the heart of the
mystery was fairly plucked out. During the second or third year of my
piscatorial experience I went through them, and through the pasture and
meadow beyond, and through another strip of hemlocks, to where the
little stream joined the main creek of the valley.

In June, when my trout fever ran pretty high, and an auspicious day
arrived, I would make a trip to a stream a couple of miles distant,
that came down out of a comparatively new settlement. It was a rapid
mountain brook presenting many difficult problems to the young angler,
but a very enticing stream for all that, with its two saw-mill dams,
its pretty cascades, i