seven feet long. A mighty bass voice had this Collins
also, and could sing, "Larboard Watch, Ahoy!" "Down in a Coal-Mine,"
and other profound ditties in a way to make all the glasses on the table
jingle; but withal, as you now suspect, rather a fishy character, and
undeserving of the unqualified respect which the boy had for him.
And there was Dr. Romsen, lean, satirical, kindly, a skilful though
reluctant physician, who regarded it as a personal injury if any one
in the party fell sick in summer time; and a passionately unsuccessful
hunter, who would sit all night in the crotch of a tree beside an
alleged deer-lick, and come home perfectly satisfied if he had heard
a hedgehog grunt. It was he who called attention to the discrepancy
between the boy's appetite and his size by saying loudly at a picnic,
"I wouldn't grudge you what you eat, my boy, if I could only see that
it did you any good,"--which remark was not forgiven until the doctor
redeemed his reputation by pronouncing a serious medical opinion, before
a council of mothers, to the effect that it did not really hurt a boy to
get his feet wet. That was worthy of Galen in his most inspired moment.
And there was hearty, genial Paul Merit, whose mere company was an
education in good manners, and who could eat eight hard-boiled eggs for
supper without ruffling his equanimity; and the tall, thin, grinning
Major, whom an angry Irishwoman once described as "like a comb, all back
and teeth;" and many more were the comrades of the boy's father, all
of whom he admired, (and followed when they would let him,) but none
so much as the father himself, because he was the wisest, kindest, and
merriest of all that merry crew, now dispersed to the uttermost parts of
the earth and beyond.

Other streams played a part in the education of that happy boy: the
Kaaterskill, where there had been nothing but the ghosts of trout
for the last thirty years, but where the absence of fish was almost
forgotten in the joy of a first introduction to Dickens, one very
showery day, when dear old Ned Mason built a smoky fire in a cave below
Haines's Falls, and, pulling The Old Curiosity Shop out of his pocket,
read aloud about Little Nell until the tears ran down the cheeks
of reader and listener--the smoke was so thick, you know: and the
Neversink, which flows through John Burroughs's country, and past one
house in particular, perched on a high bluff, where a very dreadful old
woman come out and thr