But Rocky Run, they say, exists no longer. It has been blasted by miners
out of all resemblance to itself, and bewitched into a dingy water-power
to turn wheels for the ugly giant, Trade. It is only in the valley of
remembrance that its current still flows like liquid air; and only in
that country that you can still see the famous men who came and went
along the banks of the Lyocoming when the boy was there.

There was Collins, who was a wondrous adept at "daping, dapping, or
dibbling" with a grasshopper, and who once brought in a string of trout
which he laid out head to tail on the grass before the house in a line
of beauty forty-seven feet long. A mighty bass voice had this Collins
also, and could sing, "Larboard Watch, Ahoy!" "Down in a Coal-Mine,"
and other profound ditties in a way to make all the glasses on the table
jingle; but withal, as you now suspect, rather a fishy character, and
undeserving of the unqualified respect which the boy had for him.
And there was Dr. Romsen, lean, satirical, kindly, a skilful though
reluctant physician, who regarded it as a personal injury if any one
in the party fell sick in summer time; and a passionately unsuccessful
hunter, who would sit all night in the crotch of a tree beside an
alleged deer-lick, and come home perfectly satisfied if he had heard
a hedgehog grunt. It was he who called attention to the discrepancy
between the boy's appetite and his size by saying loudly at a picnic,
"I wouldn't grudge you what you eat, my boy, if I could only see that
it did you any good,"--which remark was not forgiven until the doctor
redeemed his reputation by pronouncing a serious medical opinion, before
a council of mothers, to the effect that it did not really hurt a boy to
get his feet wet. That was worthy of Galen in his most inspired moment.
And there was hearty, genial Paul Merit, whose mere company was an
education in good manners, and who could eat eight hard-boiled eggs for