I just _had_ to give him a chance for
his. It was all I could do. Now to fish and forget everything!"

It was a fair morning in April, with the sun just right, with the "wind
in the west when the fish bite best," and Colonel Robert Lee Ashley,
with the faithful Shag to carry his rods, creel and a lunch basket,
sallied forth from his hotel for a day beside a no-very-distant stream,
the virtues of which he had heard were most alluring as regarded trout.

"Shag!" exclaimed the colonel, when they were tramping through a field
near the river, having reached that vantage point by a most prosaic
trolley car, "this is a beautiful day!"

"It suah am, sah!"

"And I'm going to catch some fine fish!"

"I suah does hope so, Colonel!"

"All right then! Now don't say another word until I speak to you.
We'll be there pretty soon, and if there's one thing more than another
that I hate, it's to have some one talking when I'm fishing."

"Yes, sah, Colonel!"

"Um! Well, see that you mind!"

Selecting with care a fly from his numerous collection, and hoping the
appetites of the fish would incline them to consider it favorably that
morning, Colonel Ashley proceeded to make his casts, standing not far
from a bent, gnarled and twisted elm tree, that overhung the bank of
the stream where the current had cut into the soil, making a deep eddy,
in which a lazy trout might choose to lie in wait for some choice
morsel.

Lightly as a falling feather, the fisherman let his fly come to rest on
the sun-lit water, and, hardly had it sent the first, few faint ripples
circling toward shore than there was a shrill song of the reel, and the
rod became a bent bow.

"By the bones of Sir Izaak!" cried the colonel, "I've hooked one, Shag!"

"De Lord be praised! So yo' has, Colonel!" cried the negro.

"Shut up!" ordered the colonel, who was beginning to play his fish.
"Did I tell you to speak?"

But Shag only laughed. He knew his master.

After ten minutes of skilful work, during which time the trout nearly
got away by shooting under a submerged log like an undersea boat diving
beneath a battle cruiser, the colonel landed his fish, dropping it,
panting, on the green grass. Then he looked up at Shag and remarked:

"Didn't I tell you this was a perfectly beautiful day?"

"Yo' suah did, Colonel," was the chuckling answer. "Yo' suah did!"

And so much at peace with himself and all the world was Colonel Robert
Lee Ashley just then that, w