CHAPTER I

IN WHICH I AM A CAITIFF

I was sitting at one of my favorite spots engaged in looking through
my fly-book for some lure that might, perhaps, mend my luck in the
afternoon's fishing. At least, I had within the moment been so
engaged; although the truth is that the evening was so exceptionally
fine, and the spot always so extraordinarily attractive to me--this
particular angle of the stream, where the tall birches stand, being to
my mind the most beautiful bit on my whole estate--that I had
forgotten all about angling and was sitting with rod laid by upon the
bank, the fly-book scarce noted in my hand. Moreover, a peculiarly
fine specimen of Anopheles, (as I took it to be) was at that very
moment hovering over my hand, and I was anxious to confirm my judgment
as well as to enlarge my collection of mosquitoes. I had my other hand
in a pocket feeling for the little phial in which I purposed to
enclose Anopheles, if I could coax him to alight. Indeed, I say, I
was at that very moment as happy as a man need be; or, at least, as
happy as I ever expected to be. Imagine my surprise, therefore, at
that moment to hear a voice, apparently intended for me, exclaim,
"Halt! Caitiff!"

I looked up, more annoyed than displeased or startled. It is not often
one sees so fine a specimen of Anopheles; and one could have sworn
that, but for my slight involuntary movement of the hand, he must have
settled; after which--_crede experto!_--he would have been the same as
in my phial, and doomed to the chloroform within the next hour.
Besides, no matter who one may be or how engaged, it is not wholly
seemly to be accosted as a caitiff, when one is on one's own land,
offending no man on earth, owing no debt and paying no tribute,
feudal, commercial, military or personal, to any man on earth.

The situation seemed to me singular. Had the time been some centuries
earlier, the place somewhere in the old world, such speech might have
had better fitting. But the time was less than a year ago, the place
was in America. I was on my own lands, in this one of our middle
states. This was my own river; or at least, I owned the broad acres on
both sides of it for some miles. And I was a man of no slinking habit,
no repulsive mien, of that I was assured, but a successful American
of means; lately a professional man and now a man of leisure, and not
so far past thirty years of age. My fly-rod was the best that money
can buy, and the pages