supper without ruffling his equanimity; and the tall, thin, grinning
Major, whom an angry Irishwoman once described as "like a comb, all back
and teeth;" and many more were the comrades of the boy's father, all
of whom he admired, (and followed when they would let him,) but none
so much as the father himself, because he was the wisest, kindest, and
merriest of all that merry crew, now dispersed to the uttermost parts of
the earth and beyond.

Other streams played a part in the education of that happy boy: the
Kaaterskill, where there had been nothing but the ghosts of trout
for the last thirty years, but where the absence of fish was almost
forgotten in the joy of a first introduction to Dickens, one very
showery day, when dear old Ned Mason built a smoky fire in a cave below
Haines's Falls, and, pulling The Old Curiosity Shop out of his pocket,
read aloud about Little Nell until the tears ran down the cheeks
of reader and listener--the smoke was so thick, you know: and the
Neversink, which flows through John Burroughs's country, and past one
house in particular, perched on a high bluff, where a very dreadful old
woman come out and throws stones at "city fellers fishin' through her
land" (as if any one wanted to touch her land! It was the water that ran
over it, you see, that carried the fish with it, and they were not hers
at all): and the stream at Healing Springs, in the Virginia mountains,
where the medicinal waters flow down into a lovely wild brook without
injuring the health of the trout in the least, and where the only
drawback to the angler's happiness is the abundance of rattlesnakes--but
a boy does not mind such things as that; he feels as if he were
immortal. Over all these streams memory skips lightly, and strikes a
trail through the woods to the Adirondacks, where the boy made his first
acquaintance with navigable rivers,--that is to say, rivers which
are traversed by canoes and hunting-skiffs, but not yet defiled by