"Bertram! Bertram!" called my mother, but I did not heed her. I stopped at a grocery for cheese and crackers, and strode off to the farthest brook—farthest, I mean, from Sun Dial. Troublesome Brook, it was called, not so much for the spring freshets that spread it over the lower meadows as for the law-suits it had flowed through in its fickle course between two town-ships and good farm-lands. Under its willows I cooled my wrath and disentangled my knotted tackle. The stream flowed silently. There was no wind, no sound, indeed, but the drone of insects; all about me was a world in reverie, mid-summer-green save for the white and blue above and the yellow wings of vagrant butterflies and the sun golden on the meadows. Many a time I have fished in that very spot. It is a likely one for idleness and for larger fish than any I ever caught there, and waiting for them as a boy I used to read in the little pocket-fitting books I dote on to this day—they fit the hand so warmly, unlike their bigger brethren, who at the most give you three-fingers' courtesy. There on that same moist bank I have sounded deeper pools than Troublesome's, and have come home laden with unlooked-for spoil that glistens still in a certain time-worn upper creel of mine.
But I had no book that day, having forgotten one in my hurried parting, and I had not yet mastered that other tranquil art of packing little bowls with minced brown meditation—so I was restless. The world seemed but half awake. I chafed at the stillness. Before, I had found it pleasant; now it nettled me. I frowned impatiently at my cork dozing on the waters. I roused it savagely, and gazed up at the sun.
"Queer," I said to myself. "Queer it should be so late this morning"—but I did not mean the sun.
Trains from the West glide into Grassy Ford on a long curve following the trend of Troublesome and the pastoral valley through which it runs. It is a descending grade down which the cars plunge roaring as though they had gathered speed rather than slackened it, and as though they would run the gantlet of the ugly buildings and red freight-cars that, from the windows of the train, are all one sees of our lovely town. Now the Black Arrow was the pride of the X., Y. & Z., and all that summer had arrived in the nick of its schedule time.
"Funny," said I to myself, looking at the sun. "Funny it should be late this morning."
I pulled up my hook and cast it in again. My cork shook itself—yawned, I was about to say, and settled down again as complacently as before. Leisurely the ripples widened and were effaced among the shadows.
What right had any one to assume that I had not long planned to go a-fishing that very morning?
I pulled up my line again.
Even a father should not presume on the kinship of his son.