s now, too. I'll go home and
get my dinner and go straight over with them. That'll leave me time
for another try at them about sunset. Whew, how hot it is! I must take
Ella May home a bunch of them blue flags. They're real handsome!"

He tied his skiff under the crowding alders, gathered a big bunch of
the purple flag lilies with their silky petals, and started homeward,
whistling cheerily as he stepped briskly along the fern-carpeted wood
path that wound up the hill under the beeches and firs.

He was a freckled, sunburned lad of thirteen years. His neighbours all
said that Danny was "as smart as a steel trap," and immediately added
that they wondered where he got his smartness from--certainly not from
his father!

The elder Phillips had been denominated "shiftless and slack-twisted"
by all who ever had any dealings with him in his unlucky, aimless
life--one of those improvident, easygoing souls who sit contentedly
down to breakfast with a very faint idea where their dinner is to come
from.

When he had died, no one had missed him, unless it were his patient,
sad-eyed wife, who bravely faced her hard lot, and toiled
unremittingly to keep a home for her two children--Dan and a girl two
years younger, who was a helpless cripple, suffering from some form of
spinal disease.

Dan, who was old and steady for his years, had gone manfully to work
to assist his mother. Though he had been disappointed in all his
efforts to obtain steady employment, he was active and obliging, and
earned many a small amount by odd jobs around the village, and by
helping the Carleton farmers in planting and harvest.

For the last two years, however, his most profitable source of summer
income had been the trout pond. The former owner had allowed anyone
who wished to fish in his pond, and Dan made a regular business of it,
selling his trout at the big hotels over at Mosquito Lake. This, in
spite of its unattractive name, was a popular summer resort, and Dan
always found a ready market for his catch.

When Mr. Walters purchased the property it somehow never occurred to
Dan that the new owner might not be so complaisant as his predecessor
in the matter of the best trouting pond in the country.

To be sure, Dan often wondered why it was the pond was so deserted
this summer. He could not recall having seen a single person on it
save himself. Still, it did not cross his mind that there could be any
particular reason for this.

He always fish