CHAPTER VI. BY A QUIET STREAM
Drooping willows dipped their pendant branches in the stream that foamed and rippled over green, mossy stones. In a meadow that stretched fair and wide on either side of the water, innumerable grasshoppers were singing their song of summer. On a verdant bank reclined a man, whose advanced age might be indicated in his whitening locks, but whose bright eyes, and the quick, nervous movements as he leafed the pages of a small, green-covered book, made negative the first analysis. A little distance from him, where the sun beat down warmly, unhindered by any shade, lolled a colored man whose look now and then strayed to the reading figure.
A glance over the shoulder of the reader, were one so impolite as to take that liberty, would have disclosed, among others, this passage on the printed page:
“But yet you are to note, that as you see some willows or
palm trees bud and blossom sooner than others do, so some
trouts be, in rivers, sooner in season; and as some hollies
or oaks are longer before they cast their leaves, so are
some trouts in rivers longer before they go out of season.”
The gray-haired man closed the book, thereby revealing the title “Walton's Compleat Angler,” and looked across the stream. The sunlight flickered over its rippling surface, and now and then there was a splash in the otherwise quiet waters—a splash that to the reader was illuminating indeed.
“Shag!” he suddenly exclaimed, thereby galvanizing into life the somnolent negro.
“Yes, sah, Colonel! Yes, sah!” came the response.
“Hum! Asleep, weren't you?”
“Well, no, sah. Not zactly asleep, Colonel. I were jest takin' the fust of mah forty winks, an'—”