n afternoon--how endless and yet how swift! What perilous efforts
to leap across the foaming stream at its narrowest points; what escapes
from quagmires and possible quicksands; what stealthy creeping through
the grass to the edge of a likely pool, and cautious dropping of the
line into an unseen depth, and patient waiting for a bite, until the
restless little brother, prowling about below, discovers that the hook
is not in the water at all, but lying on top of a dry stone,--thereby
proving that patience is not the only virtue--or, at least, that it does
a better business when it has a small vice of impatience in partnership
with it!

How tired the adventurers grow as the day wears away; and as yet they
have taken nothing! But their strength and courage return as if by
magic when there comes a surprising twitch at the line in a shallow,
unpromising rapid, and with a jerk of the pole a small, wiggling fish is
whirled through the air and landed thirty feet back in the meadow.

"For pity's sake, don't lose him! There he is among the roots of the
blue flag."

"I've got him! How cold he is--how slippery--how pretty! Just like a
piece of rainbow!"

"Do you see the red spots? Did you notice how gamy he was, little
brother; how he played? It is a trout, for sure; a real trout, almost as
long as your hand."

So the two lads tramp along up the stream, chattering as if there
were no rubric of silence in the angler's code. Presently another
simple-minded troutling falls a victim to their unpremeditated art; and
they begin already, being human, to wish for something larger. In the
very last pool that they dare attempt--a dark hole under a steep bank,
where the brook issues from the woods--the boy drags out the hoped-for
prize, a splendid trout, longer than a new lead-pencil. But he feels
sure that there must be another, even larger, in the same place. He
swings his line out carefully over the water, and just as he is about to
drop it in, the little brother, perched on the sloping brink, slips on
the smooth pine-needles, and goes sliddering down into the pool up to
his waist. How he weeps with dismay, and how funnily his dress sticks to
him as he crawls out! But his grief is soon assuaged by the privilege
of carrying the trout strung on an alder twig; and it is a happy, muddy,
proud pair of urchins that climb over the fence out of the field of
triumph at the close of the day.

What does the father say, as he meets them in the