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