If fish ran low in our own river because of the swans taking more than their share, we could go to Konge-aaen (the King’s River), four or five miles away, where there were jumping fish which an Englishman came across the North Sea every year to catch with flies. This to us was a very amazing thing, and quite like an Englishman: to angle with a bit of hen feather, or even a grasshopper, when there were fine fat worms to be had for the digging. Really, if the truth be told, it was a rank imposition on the fish. I confess that it seems to me so even yet--not exactly a square deal. The Englishman did not discourage this attitude on our part. He went right on, and for years had a monopoly of the salmon in the stream. For we did them little damage. Once in a while very large salmon were speared by those living along the stream. More frequently a farmer haying in his field spitted a sturgeon on his pitchfork. Then there was a fight, the accounts of which we boys listened to with breathless interest when the fish was brought to town. Always it seemed to me to hark back to the days we so loved to dream of; for the sturgeon was all clad in mail, as it were, just like the knights of old, and it was often a question whether the fish would come ashore or the man go into the brook. At least that was the way he told it. If the fish said nothing, it looked grim enough to make you believe almost anything. But if one did not run to fishing,--though what healthy boy does not?--there was the heath, and then the forest. Forest sounds big. All there was of it was a patch of woodland some twenty or twenty-five acres in extent, but to us in the mellow autumn days it was an enchanted forest indeed. For under the gnarled oaks, only survivors of the sturdy giants that had once covered the land, as the names of half the villages bore witness, and had filled the seas with the bold vikings’ ships, was a wilderness of hazel bushes that was the special preserve of the Latin School boys on Saturday afternoons, or when we had “month’s leave.” Month’s leave was an afternoon off, which the school might choose itself once a month, if it had been good. Then a committee of the oldest boys went to the Rector with the observation that it was a fine day for play, while the rest of us stood with beating hearts, and if the gout did not pinch him just then, he would say, “Yes! be off,” and with a mighty shout we would run for our botany boxes and crooked sticks, and for the woods, if it was in autumn. The boxes were to hold the nuts; the crooked sticks served a double purpose. They were for walking-staffs on the homeward way, for the forest was three miles away; once there, they were indispensable to hook down the branches with. The hazel bushes grew in the twilight of the woods, much as dogwood grows with us, and were mostly big enough to climb, but the nuts were on the farthest twigs, that could only be reached and stripped by pulling them down. That was fine fun, with