100 DAYS IN THE OPEN 



He was not in search of a divinity school, or a 

 summer assembly, or a wealthy church paying fifty 

 dollars per Sunday for supplies. He sought a spot 

 where committee meetings and mosquitoes and dust 

 and noise are unknown; where he could have un- 

 limited supplies of fresh vegetables, milk, cream, 

 johnny-cake and cornmeal mush; where he could 

 tickle his lungs with the breath of the sea, and, 

 above all, where the trout hold a reception every 

 day in the week except Sunday. Do I hear 

 some dyspeptic, pessimistic preacher saying, 

 "There isn't any such place?" Skepticism is 

 not strange in one whose cup of bliss runs 

 over when he finds a place where two cot- 

 tages are built on a forty- foot lot and where 

 he can plunge into the wild dissipation of croquet. 

 Few good trout streams flow past the front door 

 of a summer hotel. It is necessary, as a rule, even 

 on Prince Edward Island, to journey beyond the 

 dooryard before coming to the favourite haunts of 

 that festive fish. The walking is good? Yes, but 

 the Preacher found a way that beats walking all 

 to death. Have a man at the hotel where you are 

 stopping, who keeps his own team and coachman; 

 who counts that day lost in which he catches no 

 trout; who is intelligent, genial, unselfish; who in- 

 vites you daily to share his buggy in trips to 

 streams that swarm with fish. Such a man there 

 is (so far as the writer knows there is but one on 

 the North American continent), and the Preacher 



