What was the meaning of these brief flashes of silver which were lighted on the surface and at once went out? Around their dying spark a circle appeared, which grew ever larger and finally was lost. It was made by fish which came up to breathe. One of them, quite near, showed his little mouth and the shining scales on his head. I had come into contact with a new world—the submarine world.
When the wind began to blow grandfather would make me sit in the bottom of the boat, upon the boards, which would be pretty wet. From thence, being still not tall, I could perceive nothing but the sky. I could the better discern its dome and on fine days the continuous vibration of the ether. While grandfather was dreaming I would sit there motionless and happy. I formed the habit of being excessively happy without knowing why, as if existence had no limits and no purpose.
Grandfather made friends also with the fishermen who were setting their nets.
“They are good fellows,” he would say; “the lake is like the country. As man leaves the city he approaches the happy state of nature.”
We came to know the manners of the trout, the perch, the voracious pike and the char, the flesh of which is as savoury as the pink flesh of the salmon.
“Aha!” said one of these artless fishermen joyfully, “all my char is engaged by the Bellevue Hotel. We rake it in night and day. They are the customers for my money.”
Thus was I initiated into the life of the land and the water. Grandfather began to be interested in my progress in the friendship of nature. He had a disciple whom he had not sought. I was the first now to turn my back upon the town, leap over walls, cross the fields without the slightest care for the crops. He treated me as an heir, or a child worthy of being one of those sluggard kings who possess the world. And one hot day in July, after we had painfully climbed a hillock whence one could overlook the plain, the forest and the lake, he began to laugh at a notion that had occurred to him.
“You know, my boy, they think I have nothing, that I am just one of those clatter-clogs that shuffle along the road with a tramp’s bundle on his back. What a joke! There is no landed proprietor richer than I—do you hear?”
His words did not surprise me. I had lost that notion of mine and thine that divides riches from poverty.
“This water, these woods, these fields,” he went on, “all these are mine. I never take any care of them, and they are mine all the same.” And like an act of investiture he laid his hand upon my head, saying: