“Gad! what’s the world coming to when a man can’t read what he likes without every whippersnapper interrupting him with—­Shag!  I say, Shag!” he went on, raising his voice from a murmured whisper to a louder command.  “Porter, send my man here!  Where’s that rascal Shag?”

“Yes, sah, Colonel!  I’m right yeah!  Yeah I is, Colonel!” and a negro, with a picturesque fringe of white, kinky hair, shuffled from the porter’s quarters, where he had been enjoying a quiet chat with the black knight of the whisk broom.  “What is you’ desire, Colonel?”

“I want peace and quiet, Shag!  That’s what I want!  Twice I’ve tried to read my book undisturbed, and that insufferable train-boy—­that rascal who probably doesn’t know an ant-fly from a piece of cheese—­has bothered me with books and papers.  He ought to know I’ve vowed not to look at a paper for two weeks, and, as for books—­”

Colonel Robert Lee Ashley closed his volume, which bore, in gold letters on the front green cover the words:  “Walton’s Complete Angler,” and laughed silently, the wrinkles of his face and around his steel-blue eyes sending the frown scurrying for some unseen trench.

“Shag,” asked the colonel, still chuckling, “what do you think that nincompoop had the infernal audacity to offer me in the way of a book?”

“I ain’t got no idea, Colonel—­not th’ leastest in th’ world!”

“He offered me a—­detective story, Shag!”

“Oh, mah good Lord, Colonel!  Not really?”

“Yes, he did, Shag!  A detective story!”

“Oh, mah good Lord!”

Shag, which was all Colonel Ashley ever called his servant, though the colored valet rejoiced in the prefixes of George Washington, threw up his hands in horror, and shook his head.  The colonel, after a period of silent, chuckling mirth, opened his book again and read: 

“And, after this manner, you may catch a trout in a hot evening.  When, as you walk by a brook, and shall hear or see him leap at flies, then if you get a grasshopper—­”

“Gad! that’s the life!” softly voiced the colonel.  Then, turning to the still waiting Shag, he went on:  “There’s nobody in the wide world who can bring peace and quiet to an angry mind like my friend Izaak Walton, is there, Shag?”

“No, sah, Colonel, they isn’t! Nobody!”

“Of course not!  Gad!  I’m glad you agree with me, Shag!”

“Yes, sah, Colonel.”

“Um!  Here, you go and give that newsboy a quarter.  Tell him I didn’t mean anything; but never again must he interrupt me when he sees me with Walton in my hand.  Anything but that!  It’s positively indecent!”

“Yes, sah, Colonel.  I done tell him that.”

“And it—­it’s sacrilegious, Shag!”

“Yes, sah, Colonel; ’tis that!”

“Well, tell him so, and give him a half dollar.  Now don’t disturb me again until we get to Colchester.  How’s the weather, Shag?”