did not bite. From under the stern-sheets he drew out
a cloth-bound book.

"Free Library," he vouchsafed, as he began to read, with one hand
holding the place while with the other he waited for the tug on the
fishline that would announce rockcod.

Saxon read the title. It was "Afloat in the Forest."

"Listen to this," he said after a few minutes, and he read several pages
descriptive of a great flooded tropical forest being navigated by boys
on a raft.

"Think of that!" he concluded. "That's the Amazon river in flood time
in South America. And the world's full of places like that--everywhere,
most likely, except Oakland. Oakland's just a place to start from, I
guess. Now that's adventure, I want to tell you. Just think of the luck
of them boys! All the same, some day I'm going to go over the Andes to
the headwaters of the Amazon, all through the rubber country, an' canoe
down the Amazon thousands of miles to its mouth where it's that wide you
can't see one bank from the other an' where you can scoop up perfectly
fresh water out of the ocean a hundred miles from land."

But Saxon was not listening. One pregnant sentence had caught her fancy.
Oakland just a place to start from. She had never viewed the city in
that light. She had accepted it as a place to live in, as an end in
itself. But a place to start from! Why not! Why not like any railroad
station or ferry depot! Certainly, as things were going, Oakland was not
a place to stop in. The boy was right. It was a place to start from. But
to go where? Here she was halted, and she was driven from the train of
thought by a strong pull and a series of jerks on the line. She began to
haul in, hand under hand, rapidly and deftly, the boy encouraging her,
until hooks, sinker, and a big gasping rockcod tumbled into the bottom
of the boat. The fish was free of the hook, and she baited afresh and
dropped the line over. The boy marked his place and closed the book.

"They'll be biting soon as fast as we can haul 'em in," he said.

But the rush of fish did not come immediately.

"Did you ever read Captain Mayne Reid?" he asked. "Or Captain Marryatt?
Or Ballantyne?"

She shook her head.

"And you an Anglo-Saxon!" he cried derisively. "Why, there's stacks of
'em in the Free Library. I have two cards, my mother's an' mine, an'
I draw 'em out all the time, after school, before I have to carry
my papers. I stick the books inside my shirt, in front, under the
suspenders. That