e season, and marbles at another, and
kites at another, and bind all boyish hearts to play mumble-the-peg at
the due time more certainly than the stars are bound to their orbits.
But when vacation came, with its annual exodus from the city, there was
only one sign in the zodiac, and that was Pisces.

No country seemed to him tolerable without trout, and no landscape
beautiful unless enlivened by a young river. Among what delectable
mountains did those watery guides lead his vagrant steps, and with
what curious, mixed, and sometimes profitable company did they make him
familiar!

There was one exquisite stream among the Alleghanies, called Lycoming
Creek, beside which the family spent a summer in a decadent inn, kept by
a tremulous landlord who was always sitting on the steps of the porch,
and whose most memorable remark was that he had "a misery in his
stomach." This form of speech amused the boy, but he did not in
the least comprehend it. It was the description of an unimaginable
experience in a region which was as yet known to him only as the seat of
pleasure. He did not understand how any one could be miserable when he
could catch trout from his own dooryard.

The big creek, with its sharp turns from side to side of the valley, its
hemlock-shaded falls in the gorge, and its long, still reaches in the
"sugar-bottom," where the maple-trees grew as if in an orchard, and the
superfluity of grasshoppers made the trout fat and dainty, was too wide
to fit the boy. But nature keeps all sizes in her stock, and a smaller
stream, called Rocky Run, came tumbling down opposite the inn, as if
made to order for juvenile use.

How well you can follow it, through the old pasture overgrown with
alders, and up past the broken-down mill-dam and the crumbling sluice,
into the mountain-cleft from which it leaps laughing! The water, except
just after a rain-storm, is as transparent as glass--old-fashioned
window-glass, I mean, in small panes, with just a tinge of green in it,
like the air in a grove of young birches. Twelve feet down in the narrow
chasm below the falls, where the water is full of tiny bubbles, like
Apollinaris, you can see the trout poised, with their heads up-stream,
motionless, but quivering a little, as if they were strung on wires.

The bed of the stream has been scooped out of the solid rock. Here and
there banks of sand have been deposited, and accumulations of loose
stone disguise the real nature of the channel