The morning advanced in rose and pearl nuances. A hundred tantalizing perfumes filled the air; field-spiders’ webs sparkled in the dew like silver gossamer; meadow larks rose at her feet, and wove delicate patterns in the air with threads of melody. Who could think amid such diverting beauty? She lifted her head, and went singing through the meadows, knee-deep in the wet and clinging grass, and laughing when the parted branches of the willows splashed her face and drenched her. And then, at the first cast she made into a still, deep pool, where the night loitered under the very eye of day, an imprudent trout took the gray hackle fly, and made off with it. The splash, and the “zip” of the tightening line through the water; and then the fight, and the capture––Well, if they were going to rise like that––
The sun was high before she became aware that she 62 was very hot and tired and hungry. Her shoes were soaking wet, her skirts and stockings splashed with mud; one shoulder was being sunburned where a twig had caught and ripped her white flannel waist; and Seth’s red silk handkerchief around her neck was scarcely a deeper crimson than her face.
“But I can’t catch them all in one day!” she exclaimed reluctantly, leaning wearily against a tree.
At that instant, under her very eyes, a trout leaped in the nearby pool.
“Impudence!” she cried. “I’ll just get you, and then quit.”
But it was one pool too many; for at the second cast her hook caught in the rough bark of a log that projected far out into the stream.
“Oh! Now I’ve done it!” she groaned.
Several smart tugs at the line, with a whipping of the rod to right and left of the log, convinced her that the hook was too deeply embedded to be released by any such operation. Sinking down on a heap of driftwood on the bank, she gloomily contemplated the consequences of her greed. There were two ways to go about it now,––to break the line and leave the hook to its fate, or to crawl out on the log and rescue it. The first was unsportsmanlike, the second was very likely to be dangerous.
“Um-m-m!” she muttered, with a grimace. “It’s not easy.”
The log ran out, at a slight inclination upward, from the center of the heap of driftwood, and its free end, where the hackle fly reposed at a distance of fully twenty feet from the bank, was suspended barely two feet above 63 the middle of the pool. She leaned forward, and gazed into its dark depths, which appeared to be scarcely stirred by the current, though five yards away the stream was making a merry racket over the shallows.