and catch the first flash and gleam of the waking trout in
the nearby waters.

He was off, then, and the lists came as promised. I employed a sort of
general purchasing agent at length to attend to them, though this I
dared not confess, for to Eddie it would have been a sacrilege not easy
to forgive. That I could delegate to another any of the precious
pleasure of preparation, and reduce the sacred functions of securing
certain brands of eating chocolate, camp candles, and boot grease (three
kinds) to a commercial basis, would, I felt, be a thing almost
impossible to explain. The final list, he notified me, would be mailed
to a hotel in Boston, for the reason, he said, that it contained things
nowhere else procurable; though I am convinced that a greater reason was
a conviction on his part that no trip could be complete without buying a
few articles in Boston at the last hour before sailing, and his desire
for me to experience this concluding touch of the joy of preparation.
Yet I was glad, on the whole, for I was able to buy secretly some things
he never would have permitted--among them a phantom minnow which looked
like a tin whistle, a little four-ounce bamboo rod, and a gorgeous Jock
Scott fly with two hooks. The tin whistle and the Jock Scott looked
deadly, and the rod seemed adapted to a certain repose of muscle after a
period of activity with the noibwood. I decided to conceal these
purchases about my person and use them when Eddie wasn't looking.

But then it was sailing time, and as the short-nosed energetic steamer
dropped away from the dock, a storm (there had been none for weeks
before) set in, and we pitched and rolled, and through a dim disordered
night I clung to my berth and groaned, and stared at my things in the
corner and hated them according to my condition. Then morning brought
quiet waters and the custom house at Yarmouth, where the tourist who is
bringing in money, and maybe a few other things, is made duly welcome
and not bothered with a lot of irrelevant questions. What Nova Scotia
most needs is money, and the fisherman and the hunter, once through the
custom house, become a greater source of revenue than any tax that could
be laid on their modest, not to say paltry, baggage, even though the
contents of one's trunk be the result of a list such as only Eddie can
prepare. There is a wholesome restaurant at Yarmouth, too, just by the
dock, where after a tossing night at sea one welcomes a breakfas