aw, the companions who helped or hindered
him in his adventures, the sublime and marvellous scenes among the
Catskills and the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains, in the midst of
which he lived and moved and had his summer holidays--all these stand
out sharp and clear, as the "Bab Ballads" say,

"Photographically lined
On the tablets of your mind."

And most vivid do these scenes and people become when the vague and
irrecoverable boy who walks among them carries a rod over his shoulder,
and you detect the soft bulginess of wet fish about his clothing, and
perhaps the tail of a big one emerging from his pocket. Then it seems
almost as if these were things that had really happened, and of which
you yourself were a great part.

The rod was a reward, yet not exactly of merit. It was an instrument of
education in the hand of a father less indiscriminate than Solomon, who
chose to interpret the text in a new way, and preferred to educate his
child by encouraging him in pursuits which were harmless and wholesome,
rather than by chastising him for practices which would likely enough
never have been thought of, if they had not been forbidden. The
boy enjoyed this kind of father at the time, and later he came to
understand, with a grateful heart, that there is no richer inheritance
in all the treasury of unearned blessings. For, after all, the love,
the patience, the kindly wisdom of a grown man who can enter into the
perplexities and turbulent impulses of a boy's heart, and give him
cheerful companionship, and lead him on by free and joyful ways to know
and choose the things that are pure and lovely and of good report, make
as fair an image as we can find of that loving, patient Wisdom which
must be above us all if any good is to come out of our childish race.

Now this was the way in which the boy came into possession of his
undreaded rod. He was by nature and heredity one of those predestined
anglers whom Izaak Walton tersely describes as "born so." His earliest
passion was fishing. His favourite passage in Holy Writ was that place
where Simon Peter throws a line into the sea and pulls out a great fish
at the first cast.

But hitherto his passion had been indulged under difficulties--with
improvised apparatus of cut poles, and flabby pieces of string, and
bent pins, which always failed to hold the biggest fish; or perhaps with
borrowed tackle, dangling a fat worm in vain before the noses of the
staring, superc