which occupied me for
three days, and then I thought this would be a good opportunity to take
a trip to Philadelphia to look at a large steam-yacht which was in
course of construction at the shipyards there. I did not feel in such a
hurry to go back to the cot now that the Ransmores were there, and I was
sure also that Anita would like to hear about the new yacht, in which we
hoped to make a Mediterranean voyage during the winter. But early in the
forenoon of my second day in Philadelphia, while I was engaged in a
consultation concerning some of the interior fittings of the yacht, I
received a telegram from Baxter informing me that my wife had returned
from the cot on the previous evening, and was now at our town house. At
this surprising intelligence I dropped the business in hand and went to
New York by the first train.

"'Of course,' said Anita, when we were alone, 'I will tell you why I
left that precious cot. We had a very good time after you left, and I
showed the Ransmores everything. The next day Fanny and I determined to
go fishing, leaving Mrs. Ransmore to read novels in a hammock, an
occupation she adores. Isaac was just as good as he could be all the
time; he got rods for us, and made us some beautiful bait out of raw
beef, for of course we did not want to handle worms; and we started for
the river. We had just reached a place where we could see the water,
when Fanny called out that somebody had a chicken-yard there, and that
we would have to go around it. We walked ever and ever so far, over all
sorts of stones and bushes, until we made up our minds we were inside a
chicken-yard and not outside, and so we could not get around it. I was
very much put out, and did not like it a bit because we could not reach
the river; but Fanny saw through it all, and said she was sure the fence
had been put there to keep all sorts of things from disturbing us; and
then she proposed fishing in the rill.

"'We tried this a long time, but not a bite could we get; and then Fanny
went wandering up the stream to see if she could find a spring, because
she said she had heard that trout were often found in cold streams.
After a while she came running back, and said she had found the spring,
and what on earth did I think it was? She had soon come to what seemed
to be the upper end of the rill, and went down on her hands and knees
and looked under the edge of a great flat rock, and there she saw the
end of an iron pipe through which