purchase of a pair of high rubber boots. Inserted in this armour of
modern infantry, and transfigured with delight, the boy clumped through
all the little rivers within a circuit of ten miles from Caldwell, and
began to learn by parental example the yet unmastered art of complete
angling.

But because some of the streams were deep and strong, and his legs were
short and slender, and his ambition was even taller than his boots, the
father would sometimes take him up pickaback, and wade along carefully
through the perilous places--which are often, in this world, the very
places one longs to fish in. So, in your remembrance, you can see the
little rubber boots sticking out under the father's arms, and the rod
projecting over his head, and the bait dangling down unsteadily into the
deep holes, and the delighted boy hooking and playing and basketing his
trout high in the air. How many of our best catches in life are made
from some one else's shoulders!

From this summer the whole earth became to the boy, as Tennyson
describes the lotus country, "a land of streams." In school-days and
in town he acknowledged the sway of those mysterious and irresistible
forces which produce tops at one season, and marbles at another, and
kites at another, and bind all boyish hearts to play mumble-the-peg at
the due time more certainly than the stars are bound to their orbits.
But when vacation came, with its annual exodus from the city, there was
only one sign in the zodiac, and that was Pisces.

No country seemed to him tolerable without trout, and no landscape
beautiful unless enlivened by a young river. Among what delectable
mountains did those watery guides lead his vagrant steps, and with
what curious, mixed, and sometimes profitable company did they make him