gards. They had sent her things to read and things to eat; they
had drawn upon Hitchfield in the matter of flowers. Now each of them
was secretly casting about in his mind for some unique thing to offer,
which might stand out from trivial gifts, not by its cost, but by its
individuality, by the impossibility of any other person's bringing it,
and so might prepare the way for a declaration.

By a singular, yet not unnatural, coincidence, the solution presented
itself to the imagination of each of them (separately and secretly of
course) in the form of Leviathan.

I feel that a brief word of explanation is necessary here. Every New
England village that has any trout-fishing in its vicinity has also a
legend of a huge trout, a great-grandfather of fishes, praeternaturally
wise and wary, abnormally fierce and powerful, who lives in some
particular pool of the principal stream, and is seen, hooked, and
played by many anglers but never landed. Such a traditional trout there
was at Samaria. His lair was in a deep hole of the Lirrapaug, beside an
overhanging rock, and just below the mouth of the little spring-brook
that divided the Gray's farm from the Cutter's. But this trout was not
only traditional, he was also real. Small boys had fished for him, and
described vividly the manner in which their hooks had been carried
away,--but that does not count. Jags Witherbee declared that he had
struggled with him for nearly an hour, only to fall exhausted in the
rapids below the pool while the trout executed a series of somersaults
in the direction of Simsville,--but that does not count. What really
counts is that two reputable clergymen testified that they had seen
him. He rose once to Jones's fly when he was fishing up the river after
dusk, and Hopkins had seen him chase a minnow up the brook just before
sunrise. The latter witness averred that the fish made a wake like a
steamboat, and the former witness estimated his weight at a little
short of five pounds,--both called him Leviathan, and desired to draw
him out with a hook.

Now the thought that secretly occurred to each of these worthy young
men, as I say, not unnaturally, but with a strange simultaneousness
which no ordinary writer of fiction would dare to invent, was this:
"Catch Leviathan on the last day of the trout-season and present him to
Miss Gray. That will be a famous gift, and no one else can duplicate
it."

The last day of the season was July 31st. Long before day