You are fishing down the Swiftwater in the early Spring. In a shallow
pool, which the drought of summer will soon change into dry land, you
see the pale-green shoots of a little plant thrusting themselves up
between the pebbles, and just beginning to overtop the falling water.
You pluck a leaf of it as you turn out of the stream to find a
comfortable place for lunch, and, rolling it between your fingers to see
whether it smells like a good salad for your bread and cheese, you
discover suddenly that it is new mint. For the rest of that day you are
bewitched; you follow a stream that runs through the country of Auld
Lang Syne, and fill your creel with the recollections of a boy and a
rod.
[Illustration: The bed whereon memory loves to lie and dream.]
And yet, strangely enough, you cannot recall the boy himself at all
distinctly. There is only the faintest image of him on the endless roll
of films that has been wound through your mental camera: and in the very
spots where his small figure should appear, it seems as if the pictures
were always light-struck. Just a blur, and the dim outline of a new cap,
or a well-beloved jacket with extra pockets, or a much-hated pair of
copper-toed shoes—that is all you can see.
But the people that the boy saw, the companions who helped or hindered
him in his adventures, the sublime and marvellous scenes among the
Catskills and the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains, in the midst of
which he lived and moved and had his summer holidays—all these stand out
sharp and clear, as the “Bab Ballads” say,
“_Photographically lined
On the tablets of your mind._”
And most vivid do these scenes and people become when the vague and
irrecoverable boy who walks among them carries a rod over his shoulder,
and you detect the soft bulginess of wet fish about his clothing, and
perhaps the tail of a big one emerging from his pocket. Then it seems
almost as if these were things that had really happened, and of which
you yourself were a great part.
The rod was a reward, yet not exactly of merit. It was an instrument of
education in the hand of a father less indiscriminate than Solomon, who
chose to interpret the text in a new way, and preferred to educate his
child by encouraging him in pursuits which were harmless and wholesome,
rather than by chastising him for practices which would likely enough
never have been thought of, if they had not been forbidden. The boy
enjoyed this kind of father at the time, and later he came to
understand, with a grateful heart, that there is no richer inheritance
in all the treasury of unearned blessings. For, after all, the love, the
patience, the kindly wisdom of a grown man who can enter into the
perplexities and turbulent impulses of a boy’s heart, and give him
cheerful companionship, and lead him on by free and joyful ways to know
and choose the things that are pure and lovely and of good report, make
as fair an image as we can find of that loving, patient Wisdom which
must be above us all if any good is to come out of our childish race.
Now this was the way in which the boy came into possession of his
undreaded rod. He was by nature and heredity one of those predestined
anglers whom Izaak Walton tersely describes as “born so.” His earliest
passion was fishing. His favourite passage in Holy Writ was that place
where Simon Peter throws a line into the sea and pulls out a great fish
at the first cast.
But hitherto his passion had been indulged under difficulties—with
improvised apparatus of cut poles, and flabby pieces of string, and bent
pins, which always failed to hold the biggest fish; or perhaps with
borrowed tackle, dangling a fat worm in vain before the noses of the
staring, supercilious sunfish that poised themselves in the clear water
around the Lake House dock at Lake George; or, at best, on picnic
parties across the lake, marred by the humiliating presence of nurses,
and disturbed by the obstinate refusal of old Horace, the boatman, to
believe that the boy could bait his own hook, but sometimes crowned with
the delight of bringing home a whole basketful of yellow perch and
goggle-eyes. Of nobler sport with game fish, like the vaulting salmon
and the merry, pugnacious trout, as yet the boy had only dreamed. But he
had heard that there were such fish in the streams that flowed down from
the mountains around Lake George, and he was at the happy age when he
could believe anything—if it was sufficiently interesting.
There was one little river, and only one, within his knowledge and the
reach of his short legs. It was a tiny, lively rivulet that came out of
the woods about half a mile away from the hotel, and ran down
cater-cornered through a sloping meadow, crossing the road under a flat
bridge of boards, just beyond the root-beer shop at the lower end of the
village. It seemed large enough to the boy, and he had long had his eye
upon it as a fitting theatre for the beginning of a real angler’s life.
Those rapids, those falls, those deep, whirling pools with beautiful
foam on them like soft, white custard, were they not such places as the
trout loved to hide in?
You can see the long hotel piazza, with the gossipy groups of wooden
chairs standing vacant in the early afternoon; for the grown-up people
are dallying with the ultimate nuts and raisins of their mid-day dinner.
A villainous clatter of innumerable little vegetable-dishes comes from
the open windows of the pantry as the boy steals past the kitchen end of
the house, with Horace’s lightest bamboo pole over his shoulder, and a
little brother in skirts and short white stockings tagging along behind
him.
When they come to the five-rail fence where the brook runs out of the
field, the question is, Over or under? The lowlier method seems safer
for the little brother, as well as less conspicuous for persons who
desire to avoid publicity until their enterprise has achieved success.
So they crawl beneath a bend in the lowest rail,—only tearing one tiny
three-cornered hole in a jacket, and making some juicy green stains on
the white stockings,—and emerge with suppressed excitement in the field
of the cloth of buttercups and daisies.
What an afternoon—how endless and yet how swift! What perilous efforts
to leap across the foaming stream at its narrowest points; what escapes
from quagmires and possible quicksands; what stealthy creeping through
the grass to the edge of a likely pool, and cautious dropping of the
line into an unseen depth, and patient waiting for a bite, until the
restless little brother, prowling about below, discovers that the hook
is not in the water at all, but lying on top of a dry stone,—thereby
proving that patience is not the only virtue—or, at least, that it does
a better business when it has a small vice of impatience in partnership
with it!
How tired the adventurers grow as the day wears away; and as yet they
have taken nothing! But their strength and courage return as if by magic
when there comes a surprising twitch at the line in a shallow,
unpromising rapid, and with a jerk of the pole a small, wiggling fish is
whirled through the air and landed thirty feet back in the meadow.
“For pity’s sake, don’t lose him! There he is among the roots of the
blue flag.”
“I’ve got him! How cold he is—how slippery—how pretty! Just like a piece
of rainbow!”
“Do you see the red spots? Did you notice how gamy he was, little
brother; how he played? It is a trout, for sure; a real trout, almost as
long as your hand.”
So the two lads tramp along up the stream, chattering as if there were
no rubric of silence in the angler’s code. Presently another
simple-minded troutling falls a victim to their unpremeditated art; and
they begin already, being human, to wish for something larger. In the
very last pool that they dare attempt—a dark hole under a steep bank,
where the brook issues from the woods—the boy drags out the hoped-for
prize, a splendid trout, longer than a new lead-pencil. But he feels
sure that there must be another, even larger, in the same place. He
swings his line out carefully over the water, and just as he is about to
drop it in, the little brother, perched on the sloping brink, slips on
the smooth pine-needles, and goes sliddering down into the pool up to
his waist. How he weeps with dismay, and how funnily his dress sticks to
him as he crawls out! But his grief is soon assuaged by the privilege of
carrying the trout strung on an alder twig; and it is a happy, muddy,
proud pair of urchins that climb over the fence out of the field of
triumph at the close of the day.
What does the father say, as he meets them in the road? Is he frowning
or smiling under that big brown beard? You cannot be quite sure. But one
thing is clear: he is as much elated over the capture of the real trout
as any one. He is ready to deal mildly with a little irregularity for
the sake of encouraging pluck and perseverance. Before the three
comrades have reached the hotel, the boy has promised faithfully never
to take his little brother off again without asking leave; and the
father has promised that the boy shall have a real jointed fishing-rod
of his own, so that he will not need to borrow old Horace’s pole any
more.
At breakfast the next morning the family are to have a private dish; not
an every-day affair of vulgar, bony fish that nurses can catch, but
trout—three of them! But the boy looks up from the table and sees the
adored of his soul, Annie V——, sitting at the other end of the room, and
faring on the common food of mortals. Shall she eat the ordinary
breakfast while he feasts on dainties? Do not other sportsmen send their
spoils to the ladies whom they admire? The waiter must bring a hot
plate, and take this largest trout to Miss V—— (Miss Annie, not her
sister—make no mistake about it).
The face of Augustus is as solemn as an ebony idol while he plays his
part of Cupid’s messenger. The fair Annie affects surprise; she accepts
the offering rather indifferently; her curls drop down over her cheeks
to cover some small confusion. But for an instant the corner of her eye
catches the boy’s sidelong glance, and she nods perceptibly, whereupon
his mother very inconsiderately calls attention to the fact that
yesterday’s escapade has sun-burned his face dreadfully.
Beautiful Annie V——, who, among all the unripened nymphs that played at
hide-and-seek among the maples on the hotel lawn, or waded with white
feet along the yellow beach beyond the point of pines, flying with merry
shrieks into the woods when a boat-load of boys appeared suddenly around
the corner, or danced the lancers in the big, bare parlours before the
grown-up ball began—who in all that joyous, innocent bevy could be
compared with you for charm or daring? How your dark eyes sparkled, and
how the long brown ringlets tossed around your small head, when you
stood up that evening, slim and straight, and taller by half a head than
your companions, in the lamp-lit room where the children were playing
forfeits, and said, “There is not one boy here that _dares_ to kiss
_me_!” Then you ran out on the dark porch, where the honeysuckle vines
grew up the tall, inane Corinthian pillars.
Did you blame the boy for following? And were you very angry, indeed,
about what happened,—until you broke out laughing at his cravat, which
had slipped around behind his ear? That was the first time he ever
noticed how much sweeter the honeysuckle smells at night than in the
day. It was his entrance examination in the school of nature—human and
otherwise. He felt that there was a whole continent of newly discovered
poetry within him, and worshipped his Columbus disguised in curls. Your
boy is your true idealist, after all, although (or perhaps because) he
is still uncivilised.