ut on the dark porch, where the honeysuckle vines grew up
the tall, inane Corinthian pillars.

Did you blame the boy for following? And were you very angry, indeed,
about what happened,--until you broke out laughing at his cravat, which
had slipped around behind his ear? That was the first time he ever
noticed how much sweeter the honeysuckle smells at night than in the
day. It was his entrance examination in the school of nature--human and
otherwise. He felt that there was a whole continent of newly discovered
poetry within him, and worshipped his Columbus disguised in curls. Your
boy is your true idealist, after all, although (or perhaps because) he
is still uncivilised.

II.

The arrival of the rod, in four joints, with an extra tip, a brass reel,
and the other luxuries for which a true angler would willingly exchange
the necessaries of life, marked a new epoch in the boy's career. At the
uplifting of that wand, as if it had been in the hand of another Moses,
the waters of infancy rolled back, and the way was opened into the
promised land, whither the tyrant nurses, with all their proud array of
baby-chariots, could not follow. The way was open, but not by any means
dry. One of the first events in the dispensation of the rod was the
purchase of a pair of high rubber boots. Inserted in this armour of
modern infantry, and transfigured with delight, the boy clumped through
all the little rivers within a circuit of ten miles from Caldwell, and
began to learn by parental example the yet unmastered art of complete
angling.

But because some of the streams were deep and strong, and his legs were
short and slender, and his ambition was even taller than his boots, the
father would sometimes take him up pickaback, and wade along carefully
through the perilous places--which are often, in this world, the very
places one longs to fish in. So, in your remembrance, you can see the
little rubber boots sticking out under the father's arms, and the rod
projecting over his head, and the bait dangling down unsteadily into the
deep holes, and the delighted boy hooking and playing and basketing his
trout high in the air. How many of our best catches in life are made
from some one else's shoulders!

From this summer the whole earth became to the boy, as Tennyson
describes the lotus country, "a land of streams." In school-days and
in town he acknowledged the sway of those mysterious and irresistible
forces which produce tops at on