re now.

Better things than these I remember: the companions with whom I have
followed the stream in days long past; the rendezvous with a comrade at
the place where the rustic bridge crosses the brook; the hours of sweet
converse beside the friendship-fire; the meeting at twilight with my
lady Graygown and the children, who have come down by the wood-road to
walk home with me.

Surely it is pleasant to follow an old stream. Flowers grow along its
banks which are not to be found anywhere else in the wide world. "There
is rosemary, that 's for remembrance; and there is pansies, that 's for
thoughts!"

One May evening, a couple of years since, I was angling in the
Swiftwater, and came upon Joseph Jefferson, stretched out on a large
rock in midstream, and casting the fly down a long pool. He had passed
the threescore years and ten, but he was as eager and as happy as a boy
in his fishing.

"You here!" I cried. "What good fortune brought you into these waters?"

"Ah," he answered, "I fished this brook forty-five years ago. It was in
the Paradise Valley that I first thought of Rip Van Winkle. I wanted to
come back again for the sake of old times."

But what has all this to do with an open fire? I will tell you. It is
at the places along the stream, where the little flames of love and
friendship have been kindled in bygone days, that the past returns most
vividly. These are the altars of remembrance.

It is strange how long a small fire will leave its mark. The charred
sticks, the black coals, do not decay easily. If they lie well up the
hank, out of reach of the spring floods, they will stay there for years.
If you have chanced to build a rough fireplace of stones from the brook,
it seems almost as if it would last forever.

There is a mossy knoll beneath a great butternut-tree on the Swiftwater
where such a fireplace was built four years ago; and whenever I come to
that place now I lay the rod aside, and sit down for a little while by
the fast-flowing water, and remember.

This is what I see: A man wading up the stream, with a creel over his
shoulder, and perhaps a dozen trout in it; two little lads in gray
corduroys running down the path through the woods to meet him, one
carrying a frying-pan and a kettle, the other with a basket of lunch on
his arm. Then I see the bright flames leaping up in the fireplace, and
hear the trout sizzling in the pan, and smell the appetizing odour. Now
I see the lads coming back ac