was not yet ripe for candles; and the board of
deacons induced the Reverend Cotton Mather to substitute a course of
lectures on the Women of the Bible for the stereopticon exhibitions.
Hostilities gently frothed themselves away and subsided. Decoration Day
was celebrated in Samaria, according to the Hitchfield _Gazette_, "by a
notable gathering in the Town Hall, at which the Rev. Jones offered an
eloquent extemporaneous prayer and the Rev. Hopkins pronounced an
elegant oration on the Civil War, after which the survivors partook of
a banquet at the Hancock Hotel."

But the rivalry between the two leaders, sad to say, did not entirely
disappear with the peaceful reconciliation and commingling of their
forces. On the contrary, it was as if a general engagement had been
abandoned and both the opposing companies had resolved themselves into
the happy audience of a single combat. It was altogether a friendly and
chivalrous contest, you understand,--nothing bitter or malicious about
it,--but none the less it was a _duel a l'outrance_, a struggle for the
mastery between two men whom nature had made rivals, and for whom
circumstances had prepared the arena in the double sphere of love and
angling.

Hopkins had become known, during the seven years of his residence at
Samaria, as the best trout-fisherman of the village, and indeed of all
the tributary region. With the black bass there were other men who were
his equals, and perhaps one or two, like Judge Ward, who spent the
greater part of his summer vacation sitting under an umbrella in a boat
on Lake Marapaug, and Jags Witherbee, the village ne'er-do-weel, who
were his superiors. But with the delicate, speckled, evasive trout he
was easily first. He knew all the cold, foaming, musical brooks that
sang their way down from the hills. He knew the spring-holes in the
Lirrapaug River where the schools of fish assembled in the month of
May, waiting to go up the brooks in the warm weather. He knew the
secret haunts and lairs of the large fish where they established
themselves for the whole season and took toll of the passing minnows.
He knew how to let his line run with the current so that it would go in
under the bushes without getting entangled, and sink to the bottom of
the dark pools, beneath the roots of fallen trees, without the hook
catching fast. He knew how to creep up to a stream that had hollowed
out a way under the bank of a meadow, without shaking the boggy ground.
He ha