ll. The old buggy and complacent
horse were embalmed in a pungent aroma of old leather and of stables
that was entrancing; and a sweet smell of grass and sap came to them in
occasional long whiffs. There was exhilaration in the very thought of
being alive on that odorous, still morning. The young blood went
spanking in the veins. Blix's cheeks were ruddy, her little dark-brown
eyes fairly coruscating with pleasure.

"Condy, isn't it all splendid?" she suddenly burst out.

"I feel regularly bigger," he declared solemnly. "I could do anything
a morning like this."

Then they came to the lake, and to Richardson's, where the farmer lived
who was also the custodian of the lake. The complacent horse jogged
back, and Condy and Blix set about the serious business of the day.
Condy had no need to show Richardson the delightful sporting clerk's
card. The old Yankee--his twang and dry humor singularly incongruous
on that royal morning--was solicitude itself. He picked out the best
boat on the beach for them, loaned them his own anchor of railroad
iron, indicated minutely the point on the opposite shore off which the
last big trout had been "killed," and wetted himself to his ankles as
he pushed off the boat.

Condy took the oars. Blix sat in the stern, jointing the rods and
running the lines through the guides. She even baited the hooks with
the salt shrimp herself, and by nine o'clock they were at anchor some
forty feet off shore, and fishing, according to Richardson's advice, "a
leetle mite off the edge o' the weeds."

"If we don't get a bite the whole blessed day," said Condy, as he paid
out his line to the ratchet music of the reel, "we'll have fun just the
same. Look around--isn't this great?"

They were absolutely alone. The day was young yet. The lake, smooth
and still as gray silk, widened to the west and south without so much
as a wrinkle to roughen the surface. Only to the east, where the sun
looked over a shoulder of a higher hill, it flamed up into a blinding
diamond iridescence. The surrounding land lay between sky and water,
hushed to a Sunday stillness. Far off across the lake by Richardson's
they heard a dog bark, and the sound came fine and small and delicate.
At long intervals the boat stirred with a gentle clap-clapping of the
water along its sides. From the nearby shore in the growth of
manzanita bushes quail called and clucked comfortably to each other; a
bewildered yellow butterfly dan