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.


II.


The arrival of the rod, in four joints, with an extra tip, a brass reel,
and the other luxuries for which a true angler would willingly exchange
the necessaries of life, marked a new epoch in the boy's career. At the
uplifting of that wand, as if it had been in the hand of another Moses,
the waters of infancy rolled back, and the way was opened into the
promised land, whither the tyrant nurses, with all their proud array of
baby-chariots, could not follow. The way was open, but not by any means
dry. One of the first events in the dispensation of the rod was the