f to the spot; and there, looking down through the sunlit
water, we saw great patches of that rare and long-lost plant of the
Cruciferse known to science as Subularia aquatica. For forty years
it had hidden itself away, growing and blossoming and casting
abroad its tiny seeds in its watery home, unseen, or at least
unnoticed, by living soul, save by the keen, soft, limpid eyes of
Fishin' Jimmy. And he knew the trees and shrubs so well: the alder
and birch from which as a boy he cut his simple, pliant pole; the
shad-blow and iron-wood (he called them, respectively, sugarplum
and hard-hack) which he used for the more ambitious rods of maturer
years; the mooseberry, wayfaring-tree, hobble-bush, or triptoe,--it
has all these names, with stout, trailing branches, over which he
stumbled as he hurried through the woods and underbrush in the
darkening twilight.

He had never heard of entomology. Guenee, Hubner, and Fabricius
were unknown names; but he could have told these worthies many new
things. Did they know just at what hour the trout ceased leaping
at dark fly or moth, and could see only in the dim light the
ghostly white miller? Did they know the comparative merits, as a
tempting bait, of grasshopper, cricket, spider, or wasp; and could
they, with bits of wool, tinsel, and feather, copy the real
dipterous, hymenopterous, or orthopterous insect? And the birds:
he knew them as do few ornithologists, by sight, by sound, by
little ways and tricks of their own, known only to themselves and
him. The white-throat sparrow with its sweet, far-reaching chant;
the hermit-thrush with its chime of bells in the calm summer
twilight; the vesper-sparrow that ran before him as he crossed the
meadow, or sang for hours, as he fished the stream, its unvarying,
but scarcely monotonous little strain; the cedar-bird, with its
smooth brown coast of Quaker simplicity, and speech as brief and
simple as Quaker yea or nay; the winter-wren sending out his
strange, lovely, liquid warble from the high, rocky side of Cannon
Mountain; the bluebird of the early spring, so welcome to the
winter-weary dwellers in that land of ice and show, as he

"From the bluer deeps
Lets fall a quick, prophetic strain,"

of summer, of streams freed and flowing again, of waking, darting,
eager fish; the veery, the phoebe, the jay, the vireo,--all these
were friends, familiar, tried and true to Fishin' Jimmy. The cluck
and coo of the cuckoo, the bubbling s