The truth is that among river and brook fish the black bass is the only true and proper father of family. The males of the other brook tribes, once their young have been hatched, exhibit only the most casual and meandering attention toward their welfare. They seem to think that they have done enough when they have seen their offspring born in water. Let them swim, then, is their attitude. The black bass is, on the extreme other hand, a most worried and fretsome pater familias. In the period while his young are dependent and helpless his responsibilities weigh upon him severely. He is worried by trifles, and even by non-existent things, and the business of being a new father is with him a matter of all-absorbing agitation. Take a stout man, preferably somewhat bald, just under the line of forty, say, and consider him in the days when his first child has just come into the stages of breath holding and threatened spasms. Regard him as he tip-toes about the house in under-shirt and trousers and worried ferocity. Study him as he walks the floor through the hours of the night warding off imaginary dangers with agitated anger and gentle hearted ignorance. Cross this man at this time in anything that in the remotest way touches the future of his family and you will rouse a deadly enemy. So your black bass. At all other times he is cautious, wary, worldly wise. But at this time of his family's helplessness he is rash, careless and blind in his hot anger at anything that threatens them. He will strike madly at anything that comes near the surface of his pond. He will snap rashly at a fly, at a twig dropped on the water, at a shadow, at a bare hook, even, if he can see it. He lives in a constant ramp of shifting, hurrying, belligerent, aggressive defense. He is not hungry or greedy as he seems to act. He is whole-heartedly and defiantly defending his own and his home against what he is convinced is a jealous and a hostile world. Augusta, mercifully, knew none of these things. She had blundered into tragedy as unknowingly as Donahue's wandering foot had chanced to rest upon the line and save Jimmie a welcome breakfast of fish. VI All through a long, drowsy, dreamy afternoon while Donahue had taken very much his own way and gait, Augusta had watched the unfolding of the hills before them. They had passed Old Forge and the Divide where the water-sheds drop off to north and west, and were deep in the bosom of the hills. At times, for a little while, they seemed to be on the very top of all the hills, for they could see north, east, south and west, a broken picture of jutting rocks and dipping green, and the blue haze of distance running like a ribbon around it all. Then, for hours, they would be plodding noiselessly along, shut securely in a pocket, with only a few rods of the winding road showing before them and the walls of the hills closed in about them on all sides.