im.

"Are these fishes for sale?" asks Halicarnassus.

"Bet they be!" says small boy, with energy.

Halicarnassus looks meaningly at me. I look meaningly at
Halicarnassus, and both look meaningly at our empty basket.

"Won't you tell?" says Halicarnassus.

"No; won't you?" Halicarnassus whistles, the fishes are transferred
from pan to basket, and we walk away as "chirp as a cricket," reach the
sylvan party, and are speedily surrounded.

"O what beauties! Who caught them? How many are there?"

"Thirty-six," says Halicarnassus, in a lordly, thoroughbred way. "I
caught 'em."

"In a tin pan," I exclaim, disgusted with his conceit, and determined
to "take him down."

A cry of rage from Halicarnassus, a shout of derision from the party.

"And how many did you catch, pray?" demands he.

"Eight,--all cods," I answer, placidly.

Tolerably satisfied with our aquatic experience, we determined to
resume the mountains, but in a milder form; before which, however, it
became necessary to do a little shopping. An individual--one of the
party, whose name I will not divulge, and whose identity you never can
conjecture, so it isn't worth while to exhaust yourself with
guessing--found one day, while she was in the country, that she had
walked a hole through the bottom of her boots. How she discovered this
fact is of no moment; but, upon investigating the subject, she
ascertained that it could scarcely be said with propriety that there
was a hole in her boots, but, to use a term which savors of the street,
though I employ it literally, there WASN'T ANYTHING ELSE. Now the fact
of itself is not worthy of remark. That the integrity of a pair of
boots should yield to the continued solicitations of time, toil, bone,
and muscle, is too nearly a matter of everyday occurrence to excite
alarm. The "irrepressible conflict" between leather and land has, so
far as I know, been suspended but once since

"Adam delved and Eve span,"

and that was only an amnesty of forty years while the Israelites were
wandering in the wilderness. But when you are deep in the heart of the
country, scouring woods, climbing mountains, and fording rivers, having
with your usual improvidence neglected to furnish yourself with stout
boots, then a "horrid chasm," or series of chasms, yawning in the only
pair that are of any use to you, presents a spectacle which no
reflective mind can contemplate without dismay.

It was, in fact, with a good dea