“The quotation, sir, is incorrect, as usual; it is England, home and beauty.”

“Well, that’s a beauty of a birch, anyway.”

They got ashore, and fastened the painter to a sapling on the bank, because it was not long enough to go round a pile.  Then they produced their knives, and, proceeding to the place where the young birches grew, cut down two famous rods, to which they attached lines with white and green floats and small hooks with gut attachments.  The lobster can was produced, and wriggling worms fixed on the hooks.  “A worm at one end and a fool at the other,” said the lawyer.  “Speak for yourself, sir,” replied the dominie.  The next thing was to get into the canoe, which was safely effected.  Then, the question arose, how was she to be moored in the current?  Wilkinson suggested a stake driven into the bottom for the deep-sea mooring, and an attachment to the exposed root of the lovely overhanging birch for that to landward.  So Coristine sprang ashore, cut a heavier birch, and trimmed one end to a point.  Bringing this on board, he handed it to his companion, and, paddling up stream, brought him opposite the overarching tree.  The dominie drove the stake deep into the river mud and pressed it down.  The stake was all that could be desired for a deep-sea mooring, and to it the painter was attached.

“What are you going to do about your end of the vessel, Corry?” he asked.

“That’s all right,” replied the lawyer, who, forthwith, took off coat and waistcoat.

“You are not going to undress, I hope,” remarked his friend; “there is a bare possibility that people, even ladies, might be walking this way, sir, and I do not wish to be disgraced.”

“Never fear, Wilks, my boy, it’s my braces I am after.”  With this, Coristine took off these articles, and, fastening a button hole over a rusty nail in the stern, tied the other end about a root of the birch.  The dug-out was securely fastened, so that the current only rocked it a little, causing the lawyer to sing “Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep.”  Then they sat down on their boards and began fishing.

They had a very pleasant hour hooking shiners and chub, and an occasional perch that looked at a distance like a trout.  The dominie, apropos of his friend’s braces, told Alphonse Karr’s story of the bretellier in the Jardin des Plantes, and the credulous sceptic who did not believe that a suspender tree existed.  He knew that cotton grew on a shrub, and that caoutchouc exuded from a tree, and admitted the possibility of their natural combination, but thought his deceivers had reference to braces with metal attachments.

“That reminds me,” said the lawyer, “of a man from Lanark that came into our office asking where he’d find a mining geologist.  He had some grey-looking cork and leather wrapped up in a newspaper, and said he had dug them out of the ground where there was lots more of both of them.  I told him he had likely come on the remains of an old picnic, and that the leather was the skin of the ham they had taken out to make sandwiches of; but the impudent creature laughed in my face, as if any child doesn’t know that leather is the skin of beasts, and cork, of a tree!”