le, or in Meeker's Hollow; all-day trips, from morning
till night, through meadows and pastures and beechen woods, wherever
the shy, limpid stream led. What an appetite it developed! a hunger
that was fierce and aboriginal, and that the wild strawberries we
plucked as we crossed the hill teased rather than allayed. When but
a few hours could be had, gained perhaps by doing some piece of
work about the farm or garden in half the allotted time, the little
creek that headed in the paternal domain was handy; when half a day
was at one's disposal, there were the hemlocks, less than a mile
distant, with their loitering, meditative, log-impeded stream and
their dusky, fragrant depths. Alert and wide-eyed, one picked his
way along, startled now and then by the sudden bursting-up of the
partridge, or by the whistling wings of the "dropping snipe,"
pressing through the brush and the briers, or finding an easy
passage over the trunk of a prostrate tree, carefully letting his
hook down through some tangle into a still pool, or standing in some
high, sombre avenue and watching his line float in and out amid the
moss-covered boulders. In my first essayings I used to go to the
edge of these hemlocks, seldom dipping into them beyond the first
pool where the stream swept under the roots of two large trees. From
this point I could look back into the sunlit fields where the cattle
were grazing; beyond, all was gloom and mystery; the trout were
black, and to my young imagination the silence and the shadows were
blacker. But gradually I yielded to the fascination and penetrated
the woods farther and farther on each expedition, till the heart of
the mystery was fairly plucked out. During the second or third year
of my piscatorial experience I went through them, and through the
pasture and meadow beyond, and through another strip of hemlocks,
to where the little stream joined the main creek of the valley.

In June, when my trout fever ran pretty high, and an auspicious day
arrived, I would make a trip to a stream a couple of miles distant,
that came down out of a comparatively new settlement. It was a rapid
mountain brook presenting many difficult problems to the young
angler, but a very enticing stream for all that, with its two
saw-mill dams, its pretty cascades, its high, shelving rocks
sheltering the mossy nests of the phoebe-bird, and its general
wild and forbidding aspects.

But a meadow brook was always a favorite. The trout like mea