Pike was more than usually abroad, his tutor
begged to share his meditations. "Well, sir," said Pike, who was very
truthful, "I can see a green drake by the strawberry tree, the first
of the season, and your derivation of 'barbarous' put me in mind of my
barberry dye." In those days it was a very nice point to get the right
tint for the mallard's feather.

No sooner was lesson done than Pike, whose rod was ready upon the lawn,
dashed away always for the river, rushing headlong down the hill, and
away to the left through a private yard, where "no thoroughfare" was put
up, and a big dog stationed to enforce it. But Cerberus himself could
not have stopped John Pike; his conscience backed him up in trespass the
most sinful when his heart was inditing of a trout upon the rise.

All this, however, is preliminary, as the boy said when he put his
father's coat upon his grandfather's tenterhooks, with felonious intent
upon his grandmother's apples; the main point to be understood is this,
that nothing--neither brazen tower, hundred-eyed Argus, nor Cretan
Minotaur--could stop John Pike from getting at a good stickle. But, even
as the world knows nothing of its greatest men, its greatest men know
nothing of the world beneath their very nose, till fortune sneezes
dexter. For two years John Pike must have been whipping the water as
hard as Xerxes, without having ever once dreamed of the glorious trout
that lived in Crocker's Hole. But why, when he ought to have been at
least on bowing terms with every fish as long as his middle finger, why
had he failed to know this champion? The answer is simple--because of
his short cuts. Flying as he did like an arrow from a bow, Pike used to
hit his beloved river at an elbow, some furlong below Crocker's Hole,
where a sweet little stickle sailed away down stream, whereas for the
length of a meadow upward the water lay smooth, clear, and shallow;
therefore the youth, with so little time to spare, rushed into the
downward joy.

And here it may be noted that the leading maxim of the present period,
that man can discharge his duty only by going counter to the stream, was
scarcely mooted in those days. My grandfather (who was a wonderful man,
if he was accustomed to fill a cart in two days of fly-fishing on the
Barle) regularly fished down stream; and what more than a cartload need
anyone put into his basket?

And surely it is more genial and pleasant to behold our friend the
river growing and th