saw a man within a few feet, watching him.

Yan reddened--a stranger was always an enemy; he had a natural
aversion to all such, and stared awkwardly as though caught in crime.

The man, a curious looking middle-aged person, was in shabby clothes
and wore no collar. He had a tin box strapped on his bent shoulders,
and in his hands was a long-handled net. His features, smothered in a
grizzly beard, were very prominent and rugged. They gave evidence of
intellectual force, with some severity, but his gray-blue eyes had a
kindly look.

He had on a common, unbecoming, hard felt hat, and when he raised it
to admit the pleasant breeze Yan saw that the wearer had hair like his
own--a coarse, paleolithic mane, piled on his rugged brow, like a mass
of seaweed lodged on some storm-beaten rock.

"F'what are ye fynding, my lad?" said he in tones whose gentleness was
in no way obscured by a strong Scottish tang.

Still resenting somewhat the stranger's presence, Yan said:

"I'm not finding anything; I am only trying to see what that Whistling
Lizard is like."

The stranger's eyes twinkled. "Forty years ago Ah was laying by a pool
just as Ah seen ye this morning, looking and trying hard to read the
riddle of the spring Peeper. Ah lay there all day, aye, and mony
anither day, yes, it was nigh onto three years before Ah found it oot.
Ah'll be glad to save ye seeking as long as Ah did, if that's yer