But it is not only to the real life of birds and flowers that the little rivers introduce you.  They lead you often into familiarity with human nature in undress, rejoicing in the liberty of old clothes, or of none at all.  People do not mince along the banks of streams in patent-leather shoes or crepitating silks.  Corduroy and home-spun and flannel are the stuffs that suit this region; and the frequenters of these paths go their natural gaits, in calf-skin or rubber boots, or bare-footed.  The girdle of conventionality is laid aside, and the skirts rise with the spirits.

A stream that flows through a country of upland farms will show you many a pretty bit of genre painting.  Here is the laundry-pool at the foot of the kitchen garden, and the tubs are set upon a few planks close to the water, and the farmer’s daughters, with bare arms and gowns tucked up, are wringing out the clothes.  Do you remember what happened to Ralph Peden in The Lilac Sunbonnet when he came on a scene like this?  He tumbled at once into love with Winsome Charteris,—­and far over his head.

And what a pleasant thing it is to see a little country lad riding one of the plough-horses to water, thumping his naked heels against the ribs of his stolid steed, and pulling hard on the halter as if it were the bridle of Bucephalus!  Or perhaps it is a riotous company of boys that have come down to the old swimming-hole, and are now splashing and gambolling through the water like a drove of white seals very much sun-burned.  You had hoped to catch a goodly trout in that hole, but what of that?  The sight of a harmless hour of mirth is better than a fish, any day.

Possibly you will overtake another fisherman on the stream.  It may be one of those fabulous countrymen, with long cedar poles and bed-cord lines, who are commonly reported to catch such enormous strings of fish, but who rarely, so far as my observation goes, do anything more than fill their pockets with fingerlings.  The trained angler, who uses the finest tackle, and drops his fly on the water as accurately as Henry James places a word in a story, is the man who takes the most and the largest fish in the long run.  Perhaps the fisherman ahead of you is such an one,—­a man whom you have known in town as a lawyer or a doctor, a merchant or a preacher, going about his business in the hideous respectability of a high silk hat and a long black coat.  How good it is to see him now in the freedom of a flannel shirt and a broad-brimmed gray felt with flies stuck around the band.

In Professor John Wilson’s Essays Critical and Imaginative, there is a brilliant description of a bishop fishing, which I am sure is drawn from the life:  “Thus a bishop, sans wig and petticoat, in a hairy cap, black jacket, corduroy breeches and leathern leggins, creel on back and rod in hand, sallying from his palace, impatient to reach a famous salmon-cast ere the sun leave his cloud, . . . appears not only a pillar of his church, but of his kind, and in such a costume is manifestly on the high road to Canterbury and the Kingdom-Come.”  I have had the good luck to see quite a number of bishops, parochial and diocesan, in that style, and the vision has always dissolved my doubts in regard to the validity of their claim to the true apostolic succession.