lease" to send me, at a
prodigious "abatement," "stamps and whole things against four weeks
calculation."

III

The youngest children of large families are apt to be lonely folk,
somewhat retired and individualistic in their enthusiasms. I was such
a child, blessed by circumstances with few playfellows and rather
inclined to sedentary joys. Even when I reached the barbaric stage of
evolution where youth is gripped by enthusiasm for the main pursuits
of his primitive ancestors, I was fain to enjoy these in the more
sophisticated forms natural to a lonely young city-dweller.

When stamps had passed their zenith I was filled with a lust for
slaughter. Fish were at first the desired victims. Day after day I sat
watching a hopelessly buoyant cork refuse to bob into the depths of
the muddy and torpid Cuyahoga. I was like some fond parent, hoping
against hope to see his child out-live the flippant period and dive
beneath the surface of things, into touch with the great living
realities. And when the cork finally marked a historic epoch by
vanishing, and a small, inert, and intensely bored sucker was pulled
in hand over hand, I felt thrills of gratified longing and conquest
old and strong as the race.

But presently I myself was drawn, like the cork, beneath the
superficial surface of the angler's art. For in the public library I
chanced on a shelf of books, that told about fishing of a nobler,
jollier, more seductive sort. At once I was consumed with a passion
for five-ounce split-bamboo fly-rods, ethereal leaders, double-tapered
casting-lines of braided silk, and artificial flies more fair than
birds of paradise. Armed in spirit, with all these, I waded the
streams of England with kindly old Isaak Walton, and ranged the
Restigouche with the predecessors of Henry van Dyke. These dreams
brought with them a certain amount of satisfaction--about as much
satisfaction as if they had come as guests to a surprise party, each
equipped with a small sandwich and a large appetite. The visions were
pleasant, of course, but they cried out, and made me cry out, for
action. There were no trout, to be sure, within a hundred miles, and
there was no way of getting to any trouty realm of delight. But I did
what I could to be prepared for the blessed hour when we should meet.
I secured five new subscriptions or so to "The Boys' Chronicle" (let
us call it), and received in return a fly-rod so flimsy that it would
have resolved itself into