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.

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