Little Rivers [10]
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 him.
When they come to the five-rail fence where the brook runs out of
the field, the question is, Over or under? The lowlier method
seems safer for the little brother, as well as less conspicuous for
persons who desire to avoid publicity until their enterprise has
achieved success. So they crawl beneath a bend in the lowest
rail,--only tearing one tiny three-cornered hole in a jacket, and
making some juicy green stains on the white stockings,--and emerge
with suppressed excitement in the field of the cloth of buttercups
and daisies.
What an afternoon--how endless and yet how swift! What perilous
efforts to leap across the foaming stream at its narrowest points;
what escapes from quagmires and possible quicksands; what stealthy
creeping through the grass to the edge of a likely pool, and
cautious dropping of the line into an unseen depth, and patient
waiting for a bite, until the restless little brother, prowling
about below, discovers that the hook is not in the water at all,
but lying on top of a dry stone,--thereby proving that patience is
not the only virtue--or, at least, that it does a better business
when it has a small vice of impatience in partnership with it!
How tired the adventurers grow as the day wears away; and as yet
they have taken nothing! But their strength and courage return as
if by magic when there comes a surprising twitch at the line in a
shallow, unpromising rapid, and with a jerk of the pole a small,
wiggling fish is whirled through the air and landed thirty feet
back in the meadow.
"For pity's sake, don't lose him! There he is among the roots of
the blue flag."
"I've got him! How cold he is--how slippery--how pretty! Just
like a piece of rainbow!"
"Do you see the red spots? Did you notice how gamy he was, little
brother; how he played? It is a trout, for sure; a real trout,
almost as long as your hand."
So the two lads tramp along up the stream, chattering as if there
were no rubric of silence in the angler's code. Presently another
simple-minded troutling falls a victim to their unpremeditated
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 him.
When they come to the five-rail fence where the brook runs out of
the field, the question is, Over or under? The lowlier method
seems safer for the little brother, as well as less conspicuous for
persons who desire to avoid publicity until their enterprise has
achieved success. So they crawl beneath a bend in the lowest
rail,--only tearing one tiny three-cornered hole in a jacket, and
making some juicy green stains on the white stockings,--and emerge
with suppressed excitement in the field of the cloth of buttercups
and daisies.
What an afternoon--how endless and yet how swift! What perilous
efforts to leap across the foaming stream at its narrowest points;
what escapes from quagmires and possible quicksands; what stealthy
creeping through the grass to the edge of a likely pool, and
cautious dropping of the line into an unseen depth, and patient
waiting for a bite, until the restless little brother, prowling
about below, discovers that the hook is not in the water at all,
but lying on top of a dry stone,--thereby proving that patience is
not the only virtue--or, at least, that it does a better business
when it has a small vice of impatience in partnership with it!
How tired the adventurers grow as the day wears away; and as yet
they have taken nothing! But their strength and courage return as
if by magic when there comes a surprising twitch at the line in a
shallow, unpromising rapid, and with a jerk of the pole a small,
wiggling fish is whirled through the air and landed thirty feet
back in the meadow.
"For pity's sake, don't lose him! There he is among the roots of
the blue flag."
"I've got him! How cold he is--how slippery--how pretty! Just
like a piece of rainbow!"
"Do you see the red spots? Did you notice how gamy he was, little
brother; how he played? It is a trout, for sure; a real trout,
almost as long as your hand."
So the two lads tramp along up the stream, chattering as if there
were no rubric of silence in the angler's code. Presently another
simple-minded troutling falls a victim to their unpremeditated