The fisherman’s judgment as to the day was honored in full measure. The fish had never bitten more sharply, the eddies had never carried the line better. It seemed so easy, to let the line wander back and forth between the two currents, to tell when the bait was grabbed underneath, and to haul out the plunging, flapping beauty, that Isabel was all eagerness to try it, and Seth rigged the little pole for her, baited the hook self-sacrificingly with his biggest worm, which he had thought of in connection with a certain sapient father of all pike further up the river, and showed her where and how to cast the line. Alas, it was not so simple, after all, this catching of fish. First she lost a hook on a root; then it seemed to her that ages passed in which nothing whatever happened and this was followed by the discovery that her hook had entirely been stripped of bait without her suspecting it. At last there came a bite, a deep, determined tug, which she answered with a hysterical pull, hurling through the air and into the thistles far back of her a wretched little bull-head which they were unable to find for a long time, and which miserably stung her thumb with its fin when she finally did find it. After this exploit Annie must try, and she promptly twitched her line into the tree overhead. And so the day went forward, with light-hearted laughter and merriment, with the perfect happiness which the sunshine and color and perfume of June can bring alone to the young. They grew a trifle more serious at dinner time. It was in the narrow defile where the great jam of logs was, and where the river went down, black and deep, under the rotting wood with a vicious gurgle. Just above the jam there was a mound, velvety now with new grass, and comfortably shaded--a notable spot for dinner and a long rest, and then the girls could watch to much advantage Seth’s fishing from the logs, of which great things were prophesied. Here then the cloth was spread on the grass, the water put on over a fire lighted back of the mound, and the contents of the basket laid in prandial array. It was in truth a meagre dinner, but were appetites ever keener or less critical? Once during the forenoon, when allusion was made to Seth’s coming departure, Isabel had commanded that nothing be said on that subject all day long. “Let us not think of it at all,” she had said, “but just enjoy the hours as if they would never end. That is the only secret of happiness.” But now she herself traversed the forbidden line. “How strange it will all seem to you, Seth,” she mused, as she poured out the tea. “As the time draws near, don’t you almost dread it?” “What I’ve been thinking most about to-day is your coming to the farm to live. It can’t be that you are altogether pleased--after what I’ve heard you say.”