ows stones at "city fellers fishin' through her
land" (as if any one wanted to touch her land! It was the water that ran
over it, you see, that carried the fish with it, and they were not hers
at all): and the stream at Healing Springs, in the Virginia mountains,
where the medicinal waters flow down into a lovely wild brook without
injuring the health of the trout in the least, and where the only
drawback to the angler's happiness is the abundance of rattlesnakes--but
a boy does not mind such things as that; he feels as if he were
immortal. Over all these streams memory skips lightly, and strikes a
trail through the woods to the Adirondacks, where the boy made his first
acquaintance with navigable rivers,--that is to say, rivers which
are traversed by canoes and hunting-skiffs, but not yet defiled by
steamboats,--and slept, or rather lay awake, for the first time on a bed
of balsam-boughs in a tent.

III.

The promotion from all-day picnics to a two weeks' camping-trip is
like going from school to college. By this time a natural process
of evolution has raised the first rod to something lighter and more
flexible,--a fly-rod, so to speak, but not a bigoted one,--just a
serviceable, unprejudiced article, not above using any kind of bait
that may be necessary to catch the fish. The father has received the new
title of "governor," indicating not less, but more authority, and
has called in new instructors to carry on the boy's education: real
Adirondack guides--old Sam Dunning and one-eyed Enos, the last and
laziest of the Saranac Indians. Better men will be discovered for
later trips, but none more amusing, and none whose woodcraft seems more
wonderful than that of this queerly matched team, as they make the
first camp in a pelting rain-storm on the shore of Big Clear Pond. The
pitching of the tents is a lesson in architecture, the building of the
camp-fire a victory over damp nature, and the supper of potatoes and
bacon and fried trout a veritable triumph of culinary art.

At midnight the rain is pattering persistently on the canvas; the fronts
flaps are closed and tied together; the lingering fire shines through
them, and sends vague shadows wavering up and down: the governor is
rolled up in his blankets, sound asleep. It is a very long night for the
boy.

What is that rustling noise outside the tent? Probably some small
creature, a squirrel or a rabbit. Rabbit stew would be good for
breakfast. But it sounds loud