received orders from headquarters to drop
the Lane "agency," troubled me no more, merely glowering reproachfully
when we met; and Alvin Baker, whose note had been renewed, although he
hailed me with effusive cordiality, did not press his society upon
me, having no axe to grind at present. Zeb Kendrick was using the
Lane again, but he took care to bring no more "billiard roomers" as
passengers. I had as yet heard nothing from my quarrel with Tim Hallet.

I spent a good deal of my time in the Comfort, or wandering about the
shore and in the woods. One warm, cloudy morning the notion seized me to
go up to the ponds and try for black bass. There are bass in some of the
larger ponds--lakes they would be called anywhere else except on Cape
Cod--and, if one is lucky, and the weather is right, and the bait
tempting, they may be caught. This particular morning promised to
furnish the proper brand of weather, and a short excursion on the flats
provided a supply of shrimps and minnows for bait. Dorinda, who happened
to be in good humor, put up a lunch for me and, at seven o'clock, with
my rod and landing net in their cases, strapped, with my fishing boots
and coffee pot, to my back, and my bait pail in one hand and lunch
basket in the other, I started on my tramp. It was a long four miles
to Seabury's Pond, my destination, and Lute, to whom, like most
country people, the idea of a four-mile walk was sheer lunacy, urged my
harnessing the horse and driving there. But I knew the overgrown wood
roads and the difficulty of piloting a vehicle through them, and,
moreover, I really preferred to go afoot. So I marched off and left him
protesting.

Very few summer people--and only summer people or irresponsible persons
like myself waste time in freshwater fishing on the Cape--knew where
Seabury's Pond was. It lay far from macadam roads and automobile
thoroughfares and its sandy shores were bordered with verdure-clad hills
shutting it in like the sides of a bowl. To reach it from Denboro one
left the Bayport road at "Beriah Holt's place," followed Beriah's
cow path to the pasture, plunged into the oak and birch grove at
the southern edge of that pasture, emerged on a grass-grown and
bush-encumbered track which had once been the way to some early
settler's home, and had been forsaken for years, and followed that
track, in all its windings, until he saw the gleam of water between the
upper fringe of brush and the lower limbs of the trees. The