she protested, laughing; "I did not suppose you were that kind
of a Jeremiah!"

"Well, I am. I see no progress in prostrate forests, in soft-coal smoke,
in noise! I see nothing gained in trimming and cutting and ploughing and
macadamising a heavenly wilderness into mincing little gardens for the
rich." He was smiling at his own vehemence, but she knew that he was
more than half serious.

She liked him so; she always denied and disputed when he became
declamatory, though usually, in her heart, she agreed with him.

"Oh--oh!" she protested, shaking her head; "your philosophy is that of
all reactionaries--emotional arguments which never can be justified.
Why, if the labouring man delights in the harmless hurdy-gurdy and
finds his pleasure mounted on a wooden horse, should you say that the
island of his delight is 'vile'? All fulfilment of harmless happiness is
progress, my poor friend--"

"But my harmless happiness lay in seeing the wild-fowl splashing where
nothing splashes now except beer and the bathing rabble. If progress is
happiness--where is mine? Gone with the curlew and the wild duck!
Therefore, there is no progress. _Quod erat_, my illogical friend."

"But _your_ happiness in such things was an exception--"

"Exceptions prove anything!"

"Yes--but--no, they don't, either! What nonsense you can talk when you
try to. . . . As for me I'm going down to the Brier Water to look into
it. If there are any trout there foolish enough to bite at those
gaudy-feathered hooks I'll call you--"

"I'm going with you," he said, rising to his feet. She smilingly ignored
his offered hands and sprang erect unaided.

The Brier Water, a cold, deep, leisurely stream, deserved its name.
Rising from a small spring-pond almost at the foot of Silverside lawn,
it wound away through tangles of bull-brier and wild-rose, under arches
of weed and grass and clustered thickets of mint, north through one of
the strange little forests where it became a thread edged with a
duck-haunted bog, then emerging as a clear deep stream once more it
curved sharply south, recurved north again, and flowed into Shell Pond
which, in turn, had an outlet into the Sound a mile east of Wonder Head.

If anybody ever haunted it with hostile designs upon its fishy
denizens, Austin at least never did. Belted kingfisher, heron, mink, and
perhaps a furtive small boy with pole and sinker and barnyard
worm--these were the only foes the trout might dread. As for a m