the paternal domain was handy; when half a day was at one's disposal,
there were the hemlocks, less than a mile distant, with their
loitering, meditative, log-impeded stream and their dusky, fragrant
depths. Alert and wide-eyed, one picked his way along, startled now and
then by the sudden bursting-up of the partridge, or by the whistling
wings of the "dropping snipe," pressing through the brush and the
briers, or finding an easy passage over the trunk of a prostrate tree,
carefully letting his hook down through some tangle into a still pool,
or standing in some high, sombre avenue and watching his line float in
and out amid the moss-covered boulders. In my first essayings I used to
go to the edge of these hemlocks, seldom dipping into them beyond the
first pool where the stream swept under the roots of two large trees.
>From this point I could look back into the sunlit fields where the
cattle were grazing; beyond, all was gloom and mystery; the trout were
black, and to my young imagination the silence and the shadows were
blacker. But gradually I yielded to the fascination and penetrated the
woods farther and farther on each expedition, till the heart of the
mystery was fairly plucked out. During the second or third year of my
piscatorial experience I went through them, and through the pasture and
meadow beyond, and through another strip of hemlocks, to where the
little stream joined the main creek of the valley.

In June, when my trout fever ran pretty high, and an auspicious day
arrived, I would make a trip to a stream a couple of miles distant,
that came down out of a comparatively new settlement. It was a rapid
mountain brook presenting many difficult problems to the young angler,
but a very enticing stream for all that, with its two saw-mill dams,
its pretty cascades, its high, shelving rocks sheltering the mossy
nests of the phœbe-bird, and its general wild and forbidding aspects.