Jimmie was a character. What he did not know about the English language was equalled only by his abysmal ignorance of cooking. Asked to bring some breakfast-food for the Junior, he disappeared kitchenward, and when, after a long absence, one of the party went in search of him, he was discovered proudly bearing toward the table--a canteloupe. But Jimmie did his best, and that was quite enough to satisfy the happy members of our little family. He could boil potatoes well, and the water that he brought from Midge Creek was always first-class. Then, too, we had cooks of our own. “Time to stop,” do I hear the weary reader say? Very likely, but the half has not been told. You should hear about the “hermit,” with his long, white hair and beard, his piercing eyes, his little shack and garden and the romantic love-affair which is said to have driven him into voluntary exile. You have not heard of the hard tramp up the canyon, past almost innumerable cascades and rapids, back and upwards until a pool is reached where a great throng of mountain trout is assembled. That marvellous rainbow which followed the Sunday afternoon storm must be ignored. The Junior’s sand-wells, his fall from the gang-plank resulting in a broken collar-bone, the fracas with a colony of yellow-jackets, the night of storm when we feared lest the cables break and we go drifting at the mercy of wind and waves--but what’s the use? You will never know what you have missed through your insistence that you’ve had enough. The writer had intended to tell of the total depravity of those trout, manifested on the Sundays of our stay with them, as they gathered _en masse_ at the stern of the house-boat and dared the Preacher to cast a fly. Perhaps it is just as well to stop right here, for words cannot be found with which to describe the ministerial struggle. [Illustration: 0199] [Illustration: 0200] _Angling is an art, and an art worth learning; the question is whether you be capable of learning it. For Angling is something like Poetry, men are to be born so. I mean with inclinations to it, though both may be heightened by discourse and practice. But he that hopes to be a good Angler, must not only bring an inquiring, searching, observing wit; but he must bring a large measure of hope and patience, and a love and propensity to the art itself; but by having once got and practised it, then doubt not but Angling will prove to be so pleasant, that it will prove to be like virtue, a reward to itself._--Izaak Walton, _The Complete Angler._ [Illustration: 0201] XIV. SKEGEMOG POINT [Illustration: 9201] HAT’S that?” The elect lady should have been asleep instead of sitting up in bed, an animated interrogation point, for the hour was late and the ride from Chicago that day had been hot and dusty and fatiguing. “What’s what?” grunted the sleepy partner of her joys. “That noise. Don’t you hear it? It sounds like a band playing in the distance.”