the awl-shaped leaves, and thread-like stalk with its tiny round seed-vessels, like those of our common shepherd’s-purse, and Jimmy knew it at once.  “There’s a dreffle lot o’ that peppergrass out in deep water there, jest where I ketched the big pick’ril,” he said quietly.  “I seen it nigh a foot high, an’ it ’s juicier and livin’er than them dead sticks in your book.”  At our request he accompanied the unbelieving botanist and myself to the spot; and there, looking down through the sunlit water, we saw great patches of that rare and long-lost plant of the Cruciferse known to science as Subularia aquatica.  For forty years it had hidden itself away, growing and blossoming and casting abroad its tiny seeds in its watery home, unseen, or at least unnoticed, by living soul, save by the keen, soft, limpid eyes of Fishin’ Jimmy.  And he knew the trees and shrubs so well:  the alder and birch from which as a boy he cut his simple, pliant pole; the shad-blow and iron-wood (he called them, respectively, sugarplum and hard-hack) which he used for the more ambitious rods of maturer years; the mooseberry, wayfaring-tree, hobble-bush, or triptoe,—­it has all these names, with stout, trailing branches, over which he stumbled as he hurried through the woods and underbrush in the darkening twilight.

He had never heard of entomology.  Guenee, Hubner, and Fabricius were unknown names; but he could have told these worthies many new things.  Did they know just at what hour the trout ceased leaping at dark fly or moth, and could see only in the dim light the ghostly white miller?  Did they know the comparative merits, as a tempting bait, of grasshopper, cricket, spider, or wasp; and could they, with bits of wool, tinsel, and feather, copy the real dipterous, hymenopterous, or orthopterous insect?  And the birds:  he knew them as do few ornithologists, by sight, by sound, by little ways and tricks of their own, known only to themselves and him.  The white-throat sparrow with its sweet, far-reaching chant; the hermit-thrush with its chime of bells in the calm summer twilight; the vesper-sparrow that ran before him as he crossed the meadow, or sang for hours, as he fished the stream, its unvarying, but scarcely monotonous little strain; the cedar-bird, with its smooth brown coast of Quaker simplicity, and speech as brief and simple as Quaker yea or nay; the winter-wren sending out his strange, lovely, liquid warble from the high, rocky side of Cannon Mountain; the bluebird of the early spring, so welcome to the winter-weary dwellers in that land of ice and show, as he

  “From the bluer deeps
  Lets fall a quick, prophetic strain,”