THE WILLING GUEST. 



J T. HOPKINS. 



At the foot of a riffle whose sparkling 

 current flows into a stretch of mill water, 

 where there is a dam with a forebay lead- 

 ing to the turbine, in the meager shade 

 of some bank foliage I came on a boy 

 whose age might have been not far either 

 way from the bull or bear side of 16; a 

 type of a class many anglers have met and 

 will know. 



There was nothing in the personal ap- 

 pearance of the youth to suggest the fas- 

 tidious ; or that if he should live to be a 

 man he would incline toward foppishness. 

 The twig, not bent in that direction, was 

 growing vigorously away from such ser- 

 vility of fashion. His figure, lank and 

 angular, was not one which the deft mod- 

 eler in clay would desire to reproduce ; and 

 the careless, indifferent abandon of his ap- 

 parel would appal the admirers of a Beau 

 Brummel. Indeed, the coverings of his an- 

 atomy, from head to foot, were of the 

 spectacular. There was a lack of exact 

 gentility in the hat that crowned him, not 

 to be too curious as to where he did get 

 that hat. If, in the beginning, his shirt 

 had been of Alabama check, it was now, in 

 its reinforced augmentation, of the calico 

 of a previous condition of servitude. In 

 the structural basis of his gallusses it was 

 plain that the designer — his best girl, it 

 may be — had not chosen a webbing that a 

 silkworm should be proud of. There was 

 no coat to hide the variegated artistic effect 

 of the composite shirt, and the worthy fol- 

 lower, afar, of Walton, wore no shoes to 

 be criticised. 



It was afterward that I learned his name 

 and eked out something regarding the lad 

 that was not apparent on the surface. The 

 estimate formed of him and his attainments 

 did not fall much short of the correct thing. 



Pete Higgert, whose ma was Mrs. Hig- 

 gert, Mr. Higgert being his pa, needed not 

 those extraneous tokens of self respect 

 which are founded on the niceties of dress, 

 for he was better fortified in other ways. 

 He had an open, pleasing countenance ; the 

 joy of the smile, which was his own, was 

 not evanescent, and there were unmistak- 

 able evidences that he was quite ever so 

 happy as happy can be. Moreover, wheth- 

 er school kept or did not keep was of no 

 concern to be depressing. It is probable, 

 too, that he took no thought of tomorrow, 

 nor the day after ; the present, with him, 

 being regarded as something endurable for- 

 ever. He was a queer boy. If his strange 

 and unaccountable dislike was to hoe corn, 

 or worm tobacco, it was an inherent no- 



tion; but it was not thereby demonstrated 

 that he was an idler. By no means ; and to 

 intimate as much would be to charge him 

 unjustly. On the contrary, of such very 

 hard work as he held to be congenial he 

 was inordinately fond. 



Peter Higgert, of Harrison county, In- 

 diana, of the "rose and expectancy of that 



PETE. 



State," would sit on a stone by an ap- 

 proved fishing hole the blessed day long 

 and fish over time like some sportive 

 Trojan; it never once occurring to him that 

 he should strike for redress as men do in 



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