my eyes wandering; and heart, feeling, and fancy were going up and
down the earth in the most vagrant fashion. It was hopeless
dissipation to sit under the tree; and discovering a huge rock on
the hillside, I made my way to that, to try what virtue there
might be in a shadow not produced by foliage. Seated under the
brow of the boulder, I again applied myself to the dim-looking
text, but it had become utterly meaningless; and a musical cricket
under the rock would have put me to sleep if I had permitted
myself to remain. I found that neither tree nor rock would lend me
help; but down in the meadow I saw the brook sparkling, and
spanning it, a little bridge where I had been accustomed to sit,
hanging my feet over the water, and angling for minnows. It seemed
as if the bridge and the water might do something for me, and, in
a few minutes, my feet were dangling from the accustomed seat.
There, almost under my nose, close to the bottom of the clear,
cool stream, lay a huge speckled trout, fanning the sand with his
slow fins, and minding nothing about me at all. What could a boy
do with Colburn's First Lessons, when a living trout, as large and
nearly as long as his arm, lay almost within the reach of his
fingers? How long I sat there I do not know, but the tinkle of a
distant bell startled me, and I startled the trout, and fish and
vision faded before the terrible consciousness that I knew less of
my lesson than I did when I left the school-house.

This has always been my fortune when running after, or looking
for, moods. There is a popular hallucination that makes of
authors a romantic people who are entirely dependent upon moods
and moments of inspiration for the power to labor in their
peculiar way. Authors are supposed to write when they "feel like
it," and at no other time. Visions of Byron with a gin-bottle at