ff for his afternoon
breather alone. There had never been a pledge exacted of him to keep
within the wall, but he knew his father's wish, and the thought of
venturing out alone had never entered his mind. Perhaps you will say
that it was the one thing Jerry would want to do, being the thing that
was forbidden him, but you would not understand as I did the way
Jerry's mind worked. If as a boy Jerry had been impeccable in the way
of matters of duty, he was no less so now. He had been trained to do
what was right and now did it instinctively, not because it was his
duty, but because it was the only thing that occurred to him.

And so, upon a certain day in June while I was reading in my study,
Jerry went out with a rod and fly-book bound for the silent pools of
Sweetwater, where the big trout lurked. My book, I remember, was the
"Dialogues of Hylas and Philonous upon the Reality and Perfection of
Human Understanding," and before Jerry had been long gone from the
house I was completely absorbed in what Fraser in his preface calls
"the gem of British metaphysical literature." But had I known what was
to happen to Jerry on that sunny afternoon, or conceived of the
dialogue in which he was to take a part, I should have regretted the
intellectual attraction of Berkeley's fine volume which had been the
cause of my refusal to accompany the boy.

I find that I must reconstruct the incident as well as I can from my
recollection of the facts as related by Jerry in the course of several
conversations, each of which I am forced to admit amplified somewhat
the one which had preceded it.

It seems that instead of making for the stream at its nearest point to
the eastward, Jerry had cast into the woods above the gorge and worked
upstream into the mountains. His luck had been fair, and by the time
he neared the point where the Sweetwater disappeared beneath the wall
his creel was half full. He clambered over a large rock to a higher
level and found himself looking at a stranger, sitting on a fallen
tree, fastening a butterfly net. He did not discover that the stranger
was a girl until she stood up and he saw that she wore skirts, short
skirts, showing neat leather gaiters. She eyed him coolly and neither
of them spoke for a long moment, the girl probably because she was
waiting for him to speak first, Jerry because (as he described it) of
sheer surprise at the trespass and of curiosity as to its
accomplishment. Then the girl smiled at