Forthwith you enthusiastically practised with it in the back yard, to show its capabilities, while the hired girl, impeded by its gyrations, fretfully protested that you were “takin’ all outdoors.”
Your father viewed its numerous inches and smiled.
You clothed it with hook and line, an operation seemingly simple, but calling for a succession of fearful and wonderful knots, and a delicate adapting of length to length.
Thereafter it always was ready, requiring no fitting of joint and joint, no adjustment of reel, threading of eye, and attaching of snell. In your happy-go-lucky ways you were exactly suited the one to the other.
“AT LAST YOU WERE OFF”
During its periods of well-earned rest it reposed across the rafters under the peak of the woodshed, the only place that would accommodate it, although in the first fever gladly would you have carried it to bed with you.
Half the hot summer afternoon Hen and you dug bait, for you and he were going fishing on the morrow. Had you been obliged to rake the yard as diligently as you delved for worms you would have been on the verge (for the hundredth time) of running away and making the folks sorry; but there is such a wide gulf betwixt raking a yard and digging bait that even the blisters from the two performances are totally distinct.
With a prodigality that indicated at the least a week’s trip, you plied your baking-powder can—the cupboard was continually stripped of baking-powder cans, in those days—with long, fat angle worms and short, fat grubs; and topping them with dirt to preserve their freshness, you set them away till the morning.
Then, with mutual promises to “be on time,” Hen and you separated.