properly be related here.

Mark Davenport was at work on a farm a short distance from the village. He
hoped to enter college the following autumn, and he knew no means to
obtain money for a portion of his outfit except by the labor of his hands.
He could get twenty dollars a month for the summer season. Sixty, or
possibly seventy dollars!--what ideas of opulence were suggested by the
sound of those words!

It was a damp, drizzly day; there was not a settled rain, yet it was too
wet to work in the corn. Mark was therefore busy in picking loose stones
from the surface of a field cultivated the year before, and now "seeded
down" for grass. A portion of the field bordered on a pond, and the alders
upon its margin formed a dense green palisade, over which might be seen
the gray surface of the water freckled by the tiny drops of rain. Low
clouds trailed their gauzy robes over the top of Mount Quobbin, and flecks
of mist swept across the blue sides of the loftier Mount Elizabeth.

"What a perfect day for fishing!" thought Mark. "If I had my tackle here,
and a frog's leg or a shiner, I would soon have a pickerel out from
under those lilypads."

But he kept at work, and, having his basket full of stones, carried them
to the pond and plumped them in. A growl of anger came up from behind the
bushes.

"What the Devil do you mean, you lubber, throwing stones over here to
scare away the fish?"

The bushes parted at the same time, showing Hugh Branning sitting in the