"Great Scott!" said Guy. "I shall never forget. Such everything! Only the worst of it is, I shall never like anything again for evermore. Fancy shop eggs, and 'best Dosset,' and alumed bread, and stale ham after this feast of the gods, when they lived among men. There's one saint still in Cornwall—the saint of good things at the shrine of the comfortable widow."
We left the Bookworm to himself and the odd volumes of the Arminian Magazine, and suchlike food for such as he, and he seemed as pleased as Punch at the thought of being alone with anything musty, fusty, and out of date.
"Incurable," said Guy. "This reading habit sticks to a fellow of his sort, like dram-drinking to a tramp."
Guy was in the seventh heaven of delight when the daughter of the house told him that in an orchard, through which the brook ran to the sea, there were some trout. Her father used to bring home "a fine passul" sometimes, and his rod and lines were all in the house, for the boys never troubled the fish. So Guy went a-fishing, his heart full of content with his breakfast, and susceptible to the diviner impressions which the daughter of the house in blue print and white apron might make upon him. The boys called her "Phil," but her name was Phyllis; he had got so far as that, when the widow's voice awoke him from contemplation of eyes and hair, and all the points which young men like to study at chance meetings.
He found the brook, and then the orchard. The water was as bright as glass, and the sun-motes danced upon it between the shadows. Trout there were in the stream, but they had not tasted a worm for a month, except by chance, and the flies were not to their liking. Guy walked up stream to where the brook was fed by two trickling rills, where there was some depth of water, and an old, overhanging bank, and current enough for his fly to sail downward, temptingly, to the eyes of adventurous trout wanting to see life. At the deepest part the stream was shadowed by a large apple tree, and here Guy changed his flies, and cast deftly towards the spot where he felt sure the king of the stream must linger, if, indeed, it had a king. Presently, a melodious splash above his own fly told its secret, and Guy's hopes rose until he caught a little beauty, and then another, and another, and laid them on the grass, covering them with dock leaves with loving tenderness. Small fry that he would have been thankful for on other days he returned to the stream with words of advice.
Breakfast doesn't last for ever, and Guy began to feel peckish, but he wasn't going to give up yet, not he. He'd take home a fry of trout which would send an incense above the farm to the blue heavens, and make all invisible spirits envious. Presently he heard dry branches breaking under a light footstep, and the daughter of the farm stood by him, a ministering angel, with a pasty and a bottle of milk in a basket covered with a cloth of purest white. This was what she used to do for her father, who wouldn't leave off until he had a dish to his liking; and mother, thinking all men who fished for trout were the same, sent her with the basket of "croust" to keep off the pangs. So the dainty messenger. Then Guy uncovered his spoil, and Phyllis played him artlessly, so that he, in his turn, rose and bolted the sweet bait, and turned to go down stream again, only to know that he was in the toils, unless the fair angler should let him go.
She must go herself now, and Guy, who could not get away on his own account, felt grieved that release must come. It was sudden, but irresistible, and the thrilling exquisite. Then came the shock. "I am bespoke already, sir." The line parted.
Guy fished and fished until after sunset, but joy of capture was gone. He had himself been captured, and felt pity. Still he brought home a fine basket, and the comfortable widow served them up for breakfast, whole, and still beautiful.
The Bookworm, nursing his slight sprain, enjoyed himself in his own fashion, and, rummaging at the back of the open book-case, unearthed a book, bound in parchment, which commenced with farm accounts, and ended with "Receipts and Charms for the Cure of Man and Beastes." The pages were undated, but were written a hundred years ago by one Andrawartha, grandfather of the comfortable widow's husband. The document bore the following preface:—