The Dull Miss Archinard By Anne Douglas Sedgwick New York Charles Scribner's Sons 1898 Copyright, 1898, by Charles Scribner's Sons _All rights reserved_ _TO_ MY GRANDMOTHER H. M. D. Prologue PETER ODD The Dull Miss Archinard CHAPTER I. Peter Odd was fishing. He stood knee-deep in a placid bend of stream, whipping the water deftly, his eyes peacefully intent on the floating fly, his mind in the musing, impersonal mood of fisherman reverie, no definite thought forming from the appreciative impressions of sunlit meadows, cool stretches of shade beneath old trees, gleaming curves of river. For a tired man, fishing is an occupation particularly soothing, and Peter Odd was tired, tired and sad. His pleasure was now, perhaps, more that of the lover of nature than of the true sportsman, the pastoral feast of the landscape with its blue distance of wooded hill, more to him than the expected flashing leap of a scarlet-spotted beauty; yet the attitude of receptive intentness was pleasant in all its phases, no one weary thought could become dominant while the eyes rested on the water, or were raised to such loveliness of quiet English country. So much of what he saw his own too; the sense of proprietorship is, under such circumstances, an intimately pleasant thing, and although, where Odd stood at a wide curve of water, a line of hedge and tall beech-trees sloping down to the river marked the confines of his property just here, the woods and meadows before him were all his--to the blue hills on the sky almost, the park behind him stretched widely about Allersley Manor, and to the left the river ran for a very respectable number of miles through woods and meadows as beautiful. The sense of proprietorship was still new enough to give a little thrill, for the old squire had died only two years before, and the sorrow of loss had only recently roused itself to the realization of bequeathed responsibilities, to the realization that energies so called forth may perhaps make of life a thing well worth living. A life of quiet utility; to feel oneself of some earthly use; what more could one ask? The duties of a landowner in our strenuous days may well fill a man's horizon, and Odd was well content that they should do so; for the present at least; and he did not look beyond the present.