Strong hastened to the cook-tent, where he found Sinth treating the children to sugared cakes and words of motherly fondness. "Teenty little dears!" she was saying when Silas entered the door. She rose quickly, and hurried to the stove with a kind of shame on her countenance. Silas kept a sober face while he went for the water-pail, as if he had not "took notice." His joy broke free and expressed itself in loud laughter on his way to the spring. "Snook!" Sinth exclaimed, her face red with embarrassment as she heard him. She poked the fire with great energy, and added: "Let the fool laugh. I don't care if he did hear me." A new impulse from the heart of nature entered the Migley breast. Father and son were seeking an opportunity to use their muscles. The son seized a girder above his head and began to chin it; the father went to work with an axe, and his enthusiasm fell in heavy blows upon a beech log. Strong peered through the window at him and muttered the one contemptuous word, "W-woodpecker!" A poor chopper in that part of the country was always classed with the woodpeckers. Dinner over, the elder Migley opened his tin fishing-box and displayed an assortment of cheap flies and leaders. "Well, captain," said the young man, as he turned to Strong, "if you'll show us where the trout live, we'll show you who they belong to." He passed judgment and bestowed rank upon a great many people, and most of his brevets, if he had been frank with them, would have put his life in peril. "Pop" Migley touched a rib of the Emperor with his big, coercive thumb, shut one eye, and produced a kind of snore in his larynx. The wit of his son had increased the cheerfulness of Mr. Migley. He began telling coarse tales, and continued until, as the Emperor would say, he had "emptied his reel." The man who talked too much always had a "big reel," in the thought of the Emperor, and "slack line" was the phrase he applied to empty words. With everything ready for sport, they proceeded to the landing on Lost River and were soon seated in a long canoe. "We'll t-try Dunmore's trout," said Strong as they left the shore. "Dunmore's trout?" said the elder Migley. "Ay-uh," the Emperor answered. "He hitched onto an' l-lost him." "Oh, it's that fish I've heard about that grabbed off one of Dunmore's flies," said the elder Migley. "Uh-huh," the Emperor assented. As a matter of fact, the old gentleman who lived on the shore of Buckhorn had done a good deal of talking about this remarkable fish. Father and son sat with rods in hand while Strong worked through the still water and down a long rush of rapids and halted below them near a deep pool flecked with foam. "C-cast," said he. With a wild swish and a spasmodic movement of arm and shoulder, "Pop" Migley, who sat amidships, tipped the canoe until it took water. Strong dashed his paddle and recovered balance. The young man swore.