Uncle Chirgwin had set his niece a task, and the object of her present visit was no mere dawdling and thinking while perched upon the granite throne above the meadowsweets. This fact a basket and a three-pronged fork indicated. Her uncle deemed himself an authority on simples and possessed much information, mostly erroneous, concerning the properties of wild herbs and flowers. A decoction of hemp agrimony he at all times considered a most valuable bitter tonic; and of this plant the curious flesh-colored flowers on their long green stems grew pretty freely by the stream-side in the valley. The time of flowering was not yet come, but Joan knew the dull leaf of the herb well enough and, that found, she could easily dig up the root, wherein its virtue dwelt. But before starting on her search, the girl rested a while where the serrated foliage and creamy blossom of the meadowsweets laced and fringed the granite of her couch; and, as she sat there, her eye taking in the happy valley, her brain reading into the luxuriant life of nature, some strange new thoughts hidden until lately, she became suddenly conscious of a phenomenon beyond her power to immediately explain or understand It drove the hemp agrimony quite out of her head, and, when the mystery came to be explained, filled Joan's mind with the memory of her own sad affairs. First and repeatedly there glimmered a gossamer over the stream, falling into the water and as often rising again; then above the film of light flashed another, rising abruptly golden into the sunshine. Not for a moment or two did she discover the flashing thing was a fly-rod, but presently the man who held it appeared below her at a bend of the streamlet. He was clad much like the artists, and it made the blood flush hot to her cheek as she thought he might be one. Young men sometimes fished the brook for the fingerling trout it contained. They were small but sweet, and the catching them with a fly was difficult work in a stream so overhung with tangles of vine and brier, so densely planted in the wider reaches with water hemlock and lesser weeds. This fisherman, at any rate, found successful sport beyond his power to achieve. He flogged away, but hung his fly clear of the stream at every second cast and deceived not the smallest troutlet of them all. The young man, after the manner of those anglers classified as "chuck and chance it," worked his clumsy way toward Joan's chair on the granite bowlder. Motionless she sat, and her drab attire and faded sun-bonnet harmonized so well with the tones around it--the gray of the stones, the lights of the river, the masses of the meadowsweet--that while noting a broad and sparkling stickle winding away beneath her, the angler missed the girl herself. This stickle spread, with an oily tremor and white undercurrent full of air pearls, from a waterfall where the foot of Joan's throne fretted the stream. Below it the waters slowed and ran smoothly into dark