Everything being in trim for the proper conducting of household matters, I received orders to “catch a mess for supper.” Right in front of our tent, two rods away, a gravelly bar reached from the bank to the water, and the opposite side, fifty feet about, the river ran deep and rapidly. I had never failed securing a trophy from that swirl, and I sent a gray hackle on its mission as near the opposite willows, and as deftly as my skill would permit. I “struck it rich” the first cast; the fraud had barely touched the water before I saw the jaws of a beautiful trout close upon it, and felt his strength at the same instant. Since last summer’s experience I have wished more than once that I had been on that occasion the owner of a split bamboo. As it was, the sport resolved itself into a mere trial of strength between tackle and fish. In three seconds he was ignominiously snaked out on the beach, a three-pound trout, the largest I have ever caught, and enough for supper.
The whole family had “swarmed up” the bank, as Dickens would say, to enjoy my discomfiture, but the contemplated taunts were never given breath. I stood in my tracks and landed three more, and, will heart of man believe it? they complained because the three last were not as large as the first. But my merit was established; when I came home empty handed, which was hard to do, any explanation of mine was “confirmation, strong as proof of holy writ,” that the trout would not rise for anything. So much for reputation! I wonder how many fellows there are in the world who enjoy it who are no more deserving than I?
One morning I started down the stream; it was my birthday, and though nothing had been said about that momentous epoch in my history, I felt it incumbent upon me to achieve something out of the ordinary. I did. I fell off a log, head first, into a hole four feet deep. Cold? well, yes! I thought I had struck a moderate sized Arctic winter. But there was no one “there to see,” and I uttered my benison on the man who invented the sun, as I crawled out to the warmth of our daily servant and friend. My creel was not empty and I saved everything, even my temper. When I got back to camp, she who had taken “the long path with me” suggested that I was wet, that an immediate change of garments was imperative. But, having an exasperating disposition to stubbornness, I insisted that every thread must dry where it was, and it did, without even a sneeze, to punish me for not taking a woman’s advice. I had been there before.
It was determined that baby and I should tend camp for half an hour or so that afternoon, while the three natural guardians wandered off to the adjacent hillside for wild flowers wherewith to deck the tea-table. This was no new business to us. The young man with a pillow at his back, seated in the middle of a blanket rubbing his face with a teaspoon; I lying prone three feet away with my toes beating an occasional tattoo on the soft sward, my chin in my hands and brier-root between my teeth, watching him. There was a bright light in his eyes, and his cheeks were rosy, soft as velvet, yet firm and cool. What is there like the touch of a baby’s cheek pressed against your own! You must turn and kiss it, just as you did its mother’s the first time you had a right to. But is there anything more ridiculous in life than to see a baby attempt to put a spoon into his mouth before he has got the knack of it? See him hit himself in the eye with it, pretty much as a drunken man would knock a fly off his nose; smear it down his face, with his mouth wide open and turned up like a young robin’s, but it misses the place on the way down; he takes it with both chubby fists, looks at it with dignified surprise, as though for the first time aware of its presence, lets go one hand, whacks the spoon against his ear and drags it across his cheek with the same result. But persistence is characteristic of this baby, a quiet determination that has something appalling about it. If there were any raspberry jam on that spoon his face would look worse than a railroad map of the State of New York. Finally, and as it would seem, after all, more by accident than design, the spoon reaches the right place; he twists it round to the distortion of his rosebud mouth; then he looks at me, sees me laughing; the fun seems to dawn upon him; he takes the spoon out of his mouth, pounds the blanket with it, and smiles back at me, and the smile resolves itself into a well-defined laugh.
The sun has just disappeared behind the range, but there is a mellow ray of golden light that lingers about the baby’s head that makes me think—think of the one so like him, and from the base of the hill, with her hands full of wild flowers, the tallest of the three starts toward me, and I remember only the sunshine of the long path.
But I forgot to tell you about my camp stove: it is a piece of sheet iron, eighteen inches square, with a hole in the centre, eight inches in diameter; set upon four stones, it makes a first-class stove.
BOYS AND BURROS.
