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 art; and they begin already, being human, to wish for something larger.  In the very last pool that they dare attempt—­a dark hole under a steep bank, where the brook issues from the woods—­the boy drags out the hoped-for prize, a splendid trout, longer than a new lead-pencil.  But he feels sure that there must be another, even larger, in the same place.  He swings his line