He could make no sort of compact with the beverage she called coffee, and after the merest feint of breakfast he took his host’s angling-tackle and wended his way down to the river, observing that the fish would bite well to-day, since it was so cloudy. Cloudy it was, undoubtedly, sombre and drear. Now and then drizzling showers fell, and when they ceased the mists that rose in the ravines and skulked in every depression were hardly less dank and chill. The river, in its deep channel between jagged rocky gray bluffs and shelving red clay banks of the most brilliant terra-cotta tones, was of the color of copper instead of the clear steel-gray or the silvered blue it was wont to show, so much of the mud of its borders did it hold now in solution, brought down by the rains of the night. Here and there slender willows hung over it in lissome and graceful wont, with such vivid vernal suggestions in the tender budding foliage as to cause the faint green tint to shine with definite lustre, like the high lights in some artificial landscape of a canvas, amidst the dark dripping bronze-green pines of the Cove, which from this point the young man could see stretching away in sad-hued verdure some three or four miles to the opposite mountain’s base,--the breadth of the restricted little basin. This was the only large outlook at his command; for behind the house he had quitted, the slopes of the wooded mountain rose abruptly, steep, rugged, soon lost among the clouds. He gazed absently at the little cabin, the usual structure of two rooms with an open passage, as he lay on the shelving rock high above the river, the fishing-pole held by a heavy boulder fixed on it to secure it in its place, his hands clasped under his head, his hat tilted somewhat over his eyes; for despite the paucity of light in the atmosphere the mists had a certain white glaring quality. Meanwhile, he was the subject of a degree of disaffected scrutiny from indoors. “Jane Ann,” said Tubal Sims, suddenly interrupting the loud throaty wheeze by which his help-meet beguiled the tedium of washing the dishes, and which she construed as that act of devotion commonly known as singing a hymn, “that thar man ain’t got no bait on his hook.” Jane Ann set the plate in her hand down on the table, and turned her broad creased face toward her husband as he sat smoking in the passage, just outside the door. “Then he ain’t goin’ ter ketch no feesh,” she replied logically, and lifting both the plate and her droning wheeze she resumed her occupation.