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 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 familiar!