ly, if he had a light enough
rod. And not only did he throw a fly, but at the fourth or fifth cast a
fish rose, and he played it--with skirling reel and much advice and
most complimentary excitement on the part of the whole good
company--and brought it skilfully within range of Stamp's landing-net.
Never surely was trout spawned that begot such bliss in the heart of an
angler! As, with panting sides and open gills, this three-quarter-pound
treasure of treasures flopped about on the sunny stream bank all the
hereditary instinct of sport spoke up clearly in Dickie. The boy--such
is youthful masculine human nature--believed he understood at last why
the world was made! At dressing-time he had his sacred fish carried on
a plate up to his room to show Clara; and, but for strong remonstrance
on the part of that devoted handmaiden, would have kept it by his
bedside all night, so as to assure himself at intervals, by sense of
touch--let alone that of smell--of the adorable fact of its veritable
existence.

But all this, inspiring though it was, served but as prelude to a more
profoundly coveted acquaintance--that with the racing-stable. For it
was after this last that Dickie still supremely longed--the more so, it
is to be feared, because it was, if not explicitly, yet implicitly
forbidden. A spirit of defiance had entered into him. Being granted the
inch, he was disposed to take the ell. And this, not in conscious
opposition to his mother's will; but in protest, not uncourageous,
against the limitations imposed on him by physical misfortune. The
boy's blood was up, and consequently, with greater pluck than
discretion, he struggled against the intimate, inalienable enemy that
so marred his fate. And it was this not ignoble effort which culminated
in disobedience.

For driving back one afternoon, later than usual,--Ormiston had met
them, and Mary and he had taken a by-path home through the woods,--the
pony-carriage, turned along the high level road beside the lake, going
eastward, just as the string of race-horses, coming home from exercise,
passed along it coming west. Richard was driving, Chaplin, the second
coachman, sitting in the dickey at the back of the low carriage. He
checked the pony, and his eyes took in the whole scene--the blue-brown
expanse of the lake dotted with water-fowl, on the one hand, the
immense blue-brown landscape on the other, ranging away to the faint
line of the chalk downs in the south; the downwar