“I don’t know how it is,” he began, as he seated himself on the log in front of the tents, with one leg hanging down, and the other drawn up with the heel of his boot caught on a projection in the bark, his knee almost even with his nose, and his fingers locked across his shin, “I don’t know exactly why, but the catching of that trout makes me think of an adventer I had on this very lake, five year ago this summer.  It is curious how things will lay around in a man’s memory, every now and then startin’ up and presentin’ themselves, ready to be talked about—­reeled off—­as it were, and then how quietly they coil themselves away, to lay there, till some new sight, or sound, or idea, or feelin’ stirs ’em into life, and they come up again fresh and plain as ever.  Some people talk about forgotten things, but I don’t believe that any matter that gets fairly anchored in a man’s mind, can ever be forgotten, until age has broken the power of memory.  It is there, and will stay there, in spite of the ten thousand other things that get piled in on top of it, and some day it will come popping out like a cork, just as good and distinct as new.  But I was talkin’ about an adventer I had with a trout, five year ago, here on the Upper Saranac.  I was livin’ over on the Au Sable then, and came over to these parts to spend a week or so, and lay in a store of jerked venison and trout for the winter.  I brought along a bag of salt, and two or three kegs that would hold a hundred pound or so apiece, and filled ’em too with as beautiful orange-meated fellows as you’d see in a day’s drive.  The trout were plentier than they are now.  They hadn’t been fished by all the sportin’ men in creation, and they had a chance to grow to their nateral size.  You wouldn’t in them days row across any of these lakes in the trollin’ season without hitchin’ on to an eight, or ten, and now and then to a twenty-pounder.

“Wal, I was on the Upper Saranac, up towards the head of the lake, ten or twelve miles from here, trollin’ with an old-fashioned line, about as big as a pipe stem, a hundred and fifty feet long, and a hook to match.  Nobody in them days tho’t of sich contrivances as trollin’-rods, reels, and minny-gangs.  You held your lines in your fingers, and when you hooked a fish, you drew him in, hand over hand, in a human way.  It was in the latter part of June, and the way the black flies swarmed along the shore, was a thing to set anybody a scratchin’ that happened to be around.  It was a clear still mornin’, and the sun as he went up into the heavens, blazed away, and as he walked across the sky, if he didn’t pour down his heat like a furnace, I wouldn’t say so.  I had tolerable good luck in the forenoon, and landed on a rocky island to cook dinner.  I made such a meal as a hungry man makes when he’s out all alone fishin’ and huntin’ about these waters, and started off across the lake, with my trollin’ line to the length of a hundred feet or more, draggin’