as all one asked. It was the first of May, and the world
shone like a great illuminated letter with which that father of
artists, the sun, was making splendid his missal of the seasons.

The month of May was ever his tour de force. Each year he has strained
and stimulated his art to surpass himself, seeking ever a finer and a
brighter gold, a more celestial azure. Never had his gold been so
golden, his azure so dazzlingly clear and deep as on this particular
May morning; while his fancy simply ran riot in the marginal
decorations of woodland and spinney, quaint embroidered flowers and
copses full of exquisitely painted and wonderfully trained birds of
song. It was indeed a day for nature to be proud of. So seductive was
the sunshine that even the shy trout leapt at noonday, eager apparently
to change his silver for gold.

O silver fish in the silver stream,
O golden fish in the golden gleam,
Tell me, tell me, tell me true,
Shall I find my girl if I follow you?

I suppose the reader never makes nonsense rhymes from sheer gladness of
heart,--nursery doggerel to keep time with the rippling of the stream,
or the dancing of the sun, or the beating of his heart; the gibberish
of delight. As I hummed this nonsense, a trout at least three pounds
in weight, whom you would know again anywhere, leapt a yard out of the
water, and I took it, in my absurd, sun-soaked heart, as a good omen,
as though he had said, "Follow and see."

I had no will but to follow, no desire but to see. All the same,
though I affected to take him seriously, I had little suspicion how
much that trout was to mean to me,--yes, within the course of a very
few moments. Indeed, I had hardly strolled on for another quarter of a
mile, when I was suddenly aroused from wool-gathering by his loud cries
for help. Looking up, I saw him flashing desperately in mid-air, a
lovely foot of writhing silver. In another second he was swung through
the sunlight, and laid out breathing hard in a death-bed of buttercups
and daisies.

There was not a moment to be lost, if I were to repay the debt of
gratitude which in a flash I had seen that I owed him.

"Madam," I said, breathlessly springing forward, as a heavenly being
was coldly tearing the hook from the gills of the unlucky trout,
"though I am a stranger, will you do me a great favour? It is a matter
of life or death..."

She looked up at me with some surprise, but with a fine fearless
glance, a