“Young man,” said Uncle Jabez kindly, but solemnly, “there’s such a sin as presumption, and there’s some old sayin’ or other about fools rushin’ in where angels fear to tread.  If you try to grab too much at once, you’re apt to lose all.  If it was meant for me to see mother as well as hear her, I should see her; and if I was to go to pryin’ round and tryin’ to find out what’s purposely hid from me, I make no doubt but I should lose the little that’s been vouchsafed to me.  But I’d far rather hear you ask questions like that than to have you throwin’ doubt on the whole business, as you seemed inclined to do at fust.”

“Look here,” said Mr. Dickey briskly, “do you know it’s well on to half-past ten? and we were to have the key at Pegram’s by ten.  I think we’d better do what there is to do, and clear out of this as quick as we know how, and mebbe some of us will wish before an hour’s gone that we had Uncle Jabez’s knack at makin’ out a good story.”

“You speak for yourself, Dickey,” said Mr. Crumlish good-naturedly.  “There’s some of us that goes in and comes out, with nobody to care which it is, nor how long we stay; but freedom has its drawbacks, as well as other things.”

The schoolmaster laughed at himself for striking a match as he turned the last light out, but he felt moving through his brain a vague wish that Uncle Jabez would break himself of that trick he had of gazing fixedly at nothing, and that other trick of stopping suddenly in the middle of a sentence to cock his head, as if he were hearing some far-away, uncertain sound.

     MARGARET VANDEGRIFT.

FISHING IN ELK RIVER.

When a man has once absorbed into his system a love for fishing or hunting, he is under the influence of an invisible power greater than that of vaccine matter or the virus of rabies.  The sporting-fever is the veritable malady of St. Vitus, holding its victim forever on the go, as game-seasons come, and so long as back and legs, eye and ear, can wrestle with Time’s infirmities.  It breeds ambition, boasting, and “yarns” to a proverbial extent, with a general disbelief in the possible veracity of a brother sportsman, and an irresistible; desire to talk of new and privately discovered sporting-heavens.  The gold-seeker stakes his claim, the “wild-catting” oil-borer boards up his lot, the inventor patents his invention, and the author copyrights his brain-fruit; but the sportsman crazily tells all he knows.  So the secret gets out, and the discoverer is robbed of his treasure and forced to seek new fields for his rod and gun.

Colonel Bangem had enjoyed a year’s sport among the unvisited preserves of Elk River.  Mrs. Bangem and Bess, their daughter, had shared his pleasures and acquired his fondness for such of them as were within feminine reach.  Any ordinary man would have been perfectly satisfied with such company and delights; but no, when the bass began to leap and the salmon to flash their tails, the pressure was too great.  His friends the Doctor and the Professor were written to, and summoned to his find.  They came, the secret was too good to keep, and that is the way this chronicle of their doings happens to be written.