phoebe, and the glowing
masses of bee-balm blooming beside the stream; yes, and the eagerness of
one of the fishermen as he slipped along ahead of me, dropping his hook
into the pools. Occasionally he would relinquish the rod, putting it
into my hands with a rare self-denial as we came to a promising pool;
but I was more deft at gathering bee-balm than taking trout, and
willingly spared the rod to the eager angler. And even he secured only
two troutling to carry back in his mint-lined creel.

"Trout streams gurgled about the roots of my family tree," he was wont
to say as he told of his grandfather Kelly's ardor for the pastime. One
day, in crossing the fields near the old home, he showed me the stone
wall where he and his grandfather tarried the last time they went
fishing together, he a boy of ten and his grandfather past eighty. As
they rested on the wall, the old man, without noticing it, sat on the
lad's hand as it lay on the wall. "It hurt," Mr. Burroughs said, "but I
didn't move till he got ready to get up."

It was a great pleasure to go through the old sap bush with Mr.
Burroughs, for there he always lives over again the days in early spring
when sugar-making was in progress. He showed where some of the old trees
once stood,--the grandmother trees,--and mourned that they were no more;
but some of the mighty maples of his boyhood are still standing, and
each recalls youthful experiences. He sometimes goes back there now in
early spring to re-create the idyllic days. Their ways of boiling sap
are different now, and he finds less poetry in the process. But the look
of the old trees, the laugh of the robins, and the soft nasal calls
of the nuthatch, he says, are the same as in the old times. "How these
sounds ignore the years!" he exclaimed as a nuthatch piped in the
near-by trees.

Sometimes he would bring over to Woodchuck Lodge from the homestead a
cake of maple sugar from the veteran trees, and some of the maple-sugar
cookies such as his mother used to make; though he eats sparingly of
sweets nowadays. Yet, when he and a small boy would clear the table and
take the food down cellar, it was no uncommon thing to see them emerge
from the stairway, each munching one of those fat cookies, their eyes
twinkling at the thought that they had found the forbidden sweets we had
hidden so carefully.

He and this lad of eleven were great chums; they chased wild bees
together, putting honey on the stone wall, getting a l