Tawabedeewajo, bright with last winter's snow, shining against the eastern sky.

On the opposite bank I get a glimpse of a rival fisher stealing warily through the thicket in a coat now rusty and ragged though two months ago sleek and glossy enough. Without rod, snare, or spear, the mink is a notable destroyer of fish. Not so silent is the kingfisher that now comes jerking his way through the air, sending his rattling cry before him and leaving its echoes clattering far behind him. Now he hangs as if suspended by a thread while

A GENTLE ANGLER.

he scans the water twenty feet beneath him. Then the thread breaks, and he drops headlong, and, almost before the spray of his plunge has fallen, rises with a little fish on his short spear.

Here, too, minnows are taken in succession by some fish biting differently from a bass but evidently larger than rock-bass or perch. A third minnow is offered him grudgingly, for frequent drafts and some deaths occurring in spite of half-hourly changes of the water

have reduced the little prisoners of the bait-kettle to a dozen. Success has made him bold, and boldness works his ruin, for this time he swallows hook and bait. He swims deeper than the bass, and as stubbornly for a while, but gives up sooner, and, as he is drawn gasping alongside the bank, proves to be a fine pike-perch of two and a half or three pounds' weight. He is not a frequent

navigator so far up the
stream, but is often
caught near the mouth
in adjacent Wonakaka-
tuk and in great num-
bers in the lake, notably
at Kozowaapska and
Sobapskwa.
He is
handsome, game, and
in every way a good
fish.

Again my hook gets foul in a drift of brushwood, and Ruisseau, wading out to clear it, again lapses into profanity over his "jim rubbits, half fill of de creek!" With the Canuck, india - rubber is always "jim rubbit." As the stream is drawn to the level of the lake, its character changes more and more. The sluggish current sweeps slowly under the double-curved branches

of great water-maples, whose ice-scarred trunks rise from low banks rank with sedge and wild grass and sloping backward to wide marshy swamps, where we hear bitterns booming, rails cackling, innumerable frogs piping and croaking, and the fine, monotonous chime of toads, and mysterious voices that may be those of birds or of reptiles supposed to be voiceless. Every streamwardslanting log now has its row of basking turtles that tumble off at our approach, and the little green heron launches as clumsily from his perch in the tall trees and goes flapping before us. Now our is barred by an impassable outlet of

way

the

swamp on one side, and here I catch the last bass of the day.

A swarm of little fish, the biggest not an inch long, come swimming up-stream, a school yards in length hugging our shore. As here and there a silver side flashes in the sunlight, it is as if a suit of chain-armor was being drawn through the water. Now a swift bolt strikes it from beneath, and a hundred shining links are driven into the air. In the bubbling swirl beneath the break I see the brazen mail of a bass, and a few feet up-stream I drop my minnow, a prey far more tempting than these atoms, and no sooner seen than seized. In the fight that ensues I have some trouble to lead him to a fairer field and a proper place for surrender, to do which he must be got over a sort of boom which serves for a water-fence, being a single pole

spanning the stream and in the middle sagging an inch or two below the surface. Shortening my line and raising the tip of the rod, I half lift, half drag him over it, and, after some further skirmishing, bring him to shore, and Ruisseau, wading into the mud half-way to the top of his "jim rubbits" to rescue him, shows himself an artist, making a bas-relief in clay.

As I range the result of my day's sport side by side along the sod, a comely rank of fifteen bass and one pike-perch, Ruisseau proudly remarks, "I'ms guess dat ole wimmens ain't beat me, don't it?"

The sun is burning the low clouds and setting the western edge of the world on fire, and so, making a jaildelivery of our few remaining minnows, we turn backward on our long shadows and wend our way homeward.

ROWLAND E. ROBINSON.

THE haymakers at work in my uncle's side-hill meadows had an original way of telling the noon. They were not the owners of watches, and the churchclock was hidden behind the elms, over the tallest of which the top of the white spire, with its lazy vane, could barely be seen. Just at present, too, that sacred time-piece was suffering its semi-annual repairs at the hands of the deliberate Mr. Harriman, the village regulator. No: our chronometer in the hay-field was a simple but admirable combination of horse and hickory-tree. Old Charley, maneless and all but tailless, long since turned out to grass, used to take refuge from the sun under the shade of this hickory, which stood in the pasture at the foot of the hill. Here he would remain, with his nose to the trunk, switching the flies that settled on his ribs, and, as the shadow wheeled slowly in a shortening radius through the hours of the forenoon, Charley turned with it like a kind of revolving sun-dial, with his nose for a pivot. At noon the shadow thrown by the sparse foliage of the hickory was reduced to a round spot on the pasture, leaving large portions of Charley exposed to the sun. Then, with an impatient whinny, the old horse would start for the shelter of the red barn across the field, and thereupon the haymakers, hanging their scythes over the fencerail and wiping the sweat from their foreheads, would get ready to take their nooning.

I was then ætate twelve, -just the meridian of the errand-running age, and so when Charley made for the barn

I

would make for the spring, where the lunch was kept, treading as far as I could on the line of the windrows, and my bare feet shrinking over the intermediate stubble. The spring was under the hill, walled up with stones and shaded by a large chestnut-tree. The meadow thereabout was spongy, and a good place to find fringed gentians in October. A basket of bread and cold meat reposed in the shadow, and in the spring itself bobbed about some dozen stone bottles filled with cider. These bottles, when emptied, became convenient prisons for the little garter-snakes which the haymakers used to catch in the long grass. Many are the bottled snakes which Cousin Bob and I have carried up from the field and let loose among the indignant poultry in the hen-yard.

On this particular day I had taken from the cellar some of the best russet cider-interiore nota-from behind the big cistern. Each bottle had two raisins in it to assist fermentation, and had been laid on its side after being filled, to keep the cork wet. The selection of this choice deposit was a bit of hero-worship on my part: the hay-field was to be honored by a distinguished guest,— -no less than Cousin Bob himself, who had come all the way from Philadelphia to be present at his sister Kate's wedding. |

"It was so kind of you, Bob," said poor Kate, with tears in her eyes, "to come a whole week beforehand and leave all your patients."

"Awful rough on the patients," answered Bob, kissing her in the front hall: "patients under a monument by

the time I get back, I guess; and 'twouldn't make a very large cemetery either."

That was the evening before. Inside the house the family were surrounding Bob in a joyful group. Outside stood the red stage, brilliant in the light that streamed from the parlor windows. The driver was struggling up the walk with Bob's trunk, and I was dancing wildly about under a chaos of valises, dusters, and fishing-rods. A stage-arrival was always an excitement: the arrival of Bob was something to banish sleep for hours. In the watches of the night I longed for the morrow and for Bob's cheery voice shouting, Shorty, how's 'Old Smoke'? Suppose you get some grease, and we'll go at the barrel." Or else," Bad hay-weather, Charley; looks good for pickerel. Suppose you get out the scoop, and we'll try the Pound Brook for live bait right away after grub." And in the morning I awoke to the thought, "Bob's come! He's in the next room. There goes his guitar now."

66

I jumped out of bed, and dressed like a minute-man of the Revolutionary War or a freshman who hears the last strokes of the prayer-bell. I really believe that Kate's wedding seemed chiefly important to me because it brought old Bob home for a fortnight.

"Come in," said Bob, as I knocked at his door. He was seated superbly on the edge of his bed, clothed upon with his night-shirt as with the toga of old Rome, strumming an accompaniment on his guitar and singing "Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep." His generous bass bore out the song's suggestion of winds and waves and "the wet-blown face of the sea." His deep chest-notes breathed for me the quintessence of all manliness, and even the faces which he had to make when he gave them utterance were of heroic cast,-like the tragic masks of the Greek actors. "How you was, old pard?" inquired Bob, unstringing a peg in the guitar. "Do I smell the breakfast in the air, or dooz my eyes deceive my earsight ?"

I guess it's the waffles," I responded. "We're going to have some." As for

Bob's delightful slang, his "daliaunce and fair langage," I never could answer that except by gleeful and appreciative laughter.

A noise was heard below, as of a bell fiercely wielded but impeded in its vibrations by some wooden obstacle. It was produced by my uncle, who, in his matutinal energy, sought to reinforce the action of the bell by rapping it against the balusters as he rang it. Presently we heard his voice thereunto calling, Come, get up! Get up! Breakfast! Get up!"

"Ah, bella horrida bella!" said Bob. "There's the governor again. Been at it since cock-crow. Now, I suppose my landlady, with the usual foresight of her sex, has packed my collars and cuffs at the bottom of that trunk. Here, Charley, lend a hand: put those things on the bed." And he handed out in succession half a dozen pairs of boots, a pile of shirts, a box of cigars, a medicine-chest, a powder-flask, a dress-suit, and two or three human bones. "Put those on top,-Ossa on Pelion. Begun Latin yet, Charley?"

"Not yet," I answered; "but I'm going to in the fall. Jim Cassidy said I'd better. He says the classicals always lick the Englishers at foot-ball. I'm going into Classical Four. He is in Classical Three now."

I'll never smoke tobacco, no,' says little Robert Reed:

Bless you, my child, bless you!"

"Now, Bob, how can you make fun of pa in that disrespectful way? And, besides, you are just encouraging Charley to learn the habit when he gets older; and you know father wants him not to.' Katy had been a little nervous and petulant of late. Bob made no reply, but puffed reflectively.

"Jim Cassidy smokes catalpas," I volunteered; "and he isn't but six months older than me; and he said his father saw him smoking one the other day, and he just laughed."

Frightful levity in a parent!" said Bob. "Aren't you looking a little thin, Katy ?" he went on, squeezing her waist a bit.

"I don't know but I am," answered Katy listlessly. My cousin was a tall girl and very pretty. She had rosy cheeks, and gray eyes, and a large, sweet mouth. "By the way," continued Bob, a little awkwardly, "Charley says that George Spencer has come home."

Kate said nothing in response. "Charley!" I heard my aunt's voice calling to me from the back yard.

"Yes, in a minute," I shouted. "Cousin Bob, I've got to go down to the hay-field now and take the lunch. You're coming down by and by, aren't you ?"

"Any cider left ?"

"Yes, some bully,-russet cider." "Well," said Bob, "I'll come down about noon.

"All right. They're mowing the heater lot to-day." And I started

around the house.

Accordingly, when the old horse struck twelve in the manner which I

have described, and just as I was lifting the cider-bottles from the spring and the haymakers were gathering under the apple-tree in the lower part of the field, I saw Bob vault the bars and come down the hill. At the same time a buggy stopped at another set of bars. It was drawn by Dick, successor to Charley, and bore my uncle and Mr. Ketchum, the gentleman who was to marry my cousin Kate. After "hanging" the horse to the post, they also came down through the meadow, and we all met at the spring. Bob and Mr. Ketchum shook hands.

"How are you, Ketchum ? My congratulations."

"Thank you, doctor, thank you. Kate said you was coming on the stage last night, and you must excuse me for not having been at the house to meet you. I had some important business at the Farms. I'm trying to get my business all done up this week. Business before pleasure, you know."

"Yes, of course; don't mention it. Did you drive down with the governor?"

"With-? I beg your pardon." "With my father. Of course you did, though. I saw you get out." Bob laughed constrainedly, and turned to shake hands with his old friends among the men, who had seated themselves at a respectful distance and were waiting for their lunch.

My uncle was a smooth shaved, stoutish man, with a face of a uniform red color. He carried a rough appletree stick. He stood with great emphasis on the ground (his ground), with jaw dropped and eyes asquint in the sun, regarding the mowing-machine, which came clicking up through its last swath and stopped at some distance. off.

"Grass in that holler pretty thin, ain't it?" he shouted to the driver. "Wal, 'tis kind o' light. There's a piece in the middle you'll have to cut with the scythes, I guess."

"Cut it with scythes? What's that for? Don't want any peckin' round with scythes. Men got enough to do along the fences."