This "likely spot," however, was a difficult one, and for any other soul in the tiny village of Burnside--these two young rascals excepted--an impossible one. There, right under the overhanging rocks, over which a cascade tumbled twenty feet, into a swirling pool which formed one of the deepest parts of the stream, was a narrow ledge, where the moss grew thick upon the wet, slippery rocks, but in the cracks and fissures beneath that ledge, many a lusty trout was hidden.
While the two chums are wending their way to this "likely spot," which lay at a bend in the stream, just at the bottom of Hawk Woods, leaping from boulder to boulder as they crossed the broken stream, I will briefly introduce the reader to a little of their previous history.
Jack Elliot and Jamie Stuart were aged respectively fifteen and fourteen years. Only a week ago these two sturdy lads had been soundly thrashed by Dr. Birch, for playing truant and indulging in the tempting but forbidden pastime of "tickling trout" in the laughing stream, which, descending from the blue moorlands above, sang its way down through the densely wooded slopes of Crow Hill.
Jack was the youngest son of Squire Elliot of Rushworth Hall, an old but somewhat dilapidated manor, standing on one of the ridges of the Pennine Chain. His eldest brother, who was now twenty-two, was an ensign in the celebrated "John Company," and at the present time was engaged in active service in India. His second brother was at Oxford. Jack was still a scholar (though a dull one) at the old Elizabethan Grammar School just above the village, where stern Dr. Birch drilled little else but Greek and Latin into unwilling pupils.
Jack's bosom chum and schoolfellow was Jamie Stuart. Now, Jamie was an orphan, at least so far as he knew, for his mother died on the day that he was born, and his father, a somewhat daring village character, who once transgressed the game laws, was considered by a bench of land-owning gentry as "too dangerous a character to remain in Burnside, lest he should lead other folk astray," and was ultimately transported to the new colonies in North America, and forbidden to set foot in England again "on peril of his life," for those were the days of the cruel game laws, when sheep-stealing was a hanging business, and to touch a pheasant meant transportation for life.
All this happened when Jamie was a little chap of but two years, and so he never remembered either his father or his mother. His father was said to be very fond of his little boy--for despite his transgression, he was a good father and a brave man, and very much the type of man that Merry England needed at that time, to fight her enemies--and his only request when he was sentenced was, that before he left the country he might see again his little boy--a request which the selfish and hardened magistrates promptly refused.
Years passed away, and village rumours said that he had escaped from his captors directly he set foot on American soil, and had taken to the forest, amongst the Indians tribes that inhabited the backwoods of Pennsylvania, and that he had become a great chief amongst them; but this was perhaps only a rumour, for no one really knew whether he was dead or alive. So little Jamie grew up under the care of a maiden aunt, who kept a Dame School in the little village, and being a lady of some property, when the lad became ten years old, he was sent to the Old Grammar School.
The time of which I write was the middle of the eighteenth century, and England was just laying the foundations of her great future Empire, which was to be the wonder and envy of the world.
During the past twenty years, Anson and his brave sea-dogs, though always outnumbered in ships and men, had driven the French and Spaniards from the seas, and had made the name of England famous all over the world. On all the seven seas the old flag was supreme, and was proudly unfurled to every breeze that blew.
Across the burning plains of India, and under the very palace of the Old Mogul, was heard the boom of British guns, for against overwhelming odds Clive was winning brilliant victories, that would soon end in bringing the vast Indian Empire, with all its wealth and treasure, and its multitude of dark-skinned princes, to do homage at the feet of England's king. Nor was this all, for over the Atlantic, on the shores, the rivers, and the great lakes of the new world, the long campaign had already begun, which was to end in the capture of Quebec, and the wresting of the Canadas from our inveterate foes across the Channel.