118 SPECKLED TROUT. 



edly about the middle of the afternoon, at a point 

 where it was a good-sized trout stream. It proved 

 to be one of those black mountain brooks born of in- 

 numerable ice-cold springs, nourished in the shade, 

 and shod, as it were, with thick-matted moss, that 

 every camper-out remembers. The fish are as black 

 as the stream and very wild. They dart from be- 

 neath the fringed rocks, or dive with the hook into 

 the dusky depths, an integral part of the silence 

 and the shadows. The spell of the moss is over all. 

 The fisherman's tread is noiseless, as he leaps from 

 stone to stone and from ledge to ledge along the bed 

 of the stream. How cool it is ! He looks up the 

 dark, silent defile, hears the solitary voice of the 

 water, sees the decayed trunks of fallen trees bridg- 

 ing the stream, and all he has dreamed, when a boy, 

 of the haunts of beasts of prey the crouching 

 feline tribes, especially if it be near nightfall and 

 the gloom already deepening in the woods comes 

 freshly to mind, and he presses on, wary and alert, 

 and speaking to his companions in low tones. 



After an hour or so the trout became less abun- 

 dant, and with nearly a hundred of the black sprites 

 in our baskets we turned back. Here and there I 

 saw the abandoned nests of the pigeons, sometimes 

 half a dozen in one tree. In a yellow birch which 

 the floods had uprooted a number of nests were still 

 in place, little shelves or platforms of twigs loosely 

 arranged and affording little or no protection to the 

 eggs or the young birds against inclement weather. 



