io WHAT I HAVE SEEN WHILE FISHING 



happy, busy bees sang such drowsy cooing lullabies 

 that I have heard, or seemed to hear, my mother's 

 rest-song, and have put up my hand to reach the 

 ear that I had held so often. A little longer I 

 heard the twitter of the birds and the tiny voice of 

 the brook, and then a darkening cloud, and I slept. 

 When I wake it is with the odour of my sweet 

 surroundings filling my nostrils, with the balsam of 

 health in every whiff ; but my little stomach is as 

 empty as it can be, and I must perforce go home, 

 and leave the now rising trout, as I have quite a 

 doubling-up void that is like to bring my chin and 

 knees together. 



I know not how much the debt is too great 

 to calculate I owe to these youthful tramps and 

 dreams. Life is sweet. They gave me life, a 

 long life, and a store of happy memories. I was 

 a weedy skewer of a boy, with an abnormally large 

 head that no boy's hat would cover : a head so 

 large that my mother was ever ready to believe 

 that it ached too badly for school ; and if my father, 

 as he did at times, ventured to remark that I should 

 " grow up a dunce," mother would go to him and 

 whisper something which would free me from the 

 dread of books and teachers for yet another day. 

 Mother would never tell me what that potent 

 whisper was, but my father would at such times 

 give sly peeps at me, headwards, before giving way, 

 and I sometimes feared he would see it was not 

 aching so very much. It really did ache at times, 



