He slipped one thin, stained hand into his breast pocket and drew out a Pittsburg stogie of the longest, thinnest, and stogiest type. Peter shuddered inwardly and ventured to ask if he might smoke cigarettes instead. "Perhaps you would have one yourself, sir," he added, noting a funny little twinkle in the old man's eye. "Well--you know----" Walter Lord spoke with slight embarrassment, at the same time reaching out an eager hand, "I must say I do prefer 'em to cigars, but Miranda, well, she kind of feels that--that cigars are more suitable for a man of my age--and so----" He lit one of Peter's cigarettes, inhaled a long, delicious whiff, and smiled gently. "Dear old duck," thought Peter, "with the heart of a kid, and scared to death of his sister-in-law. Bet she's a Tartar. Thank heaven she isn't here." Peter leaned his head back against a large yellow butterfly worked in wool on a black background, crossed his long legs and smoked leisurely, with the air of a man at ease. "There must be a lot of good fishing around here," he remarked, taking a long shot at a possible hobby of the man he had determined should be his host. "Crossed a lot of likely looking streams as we came up through the mountains." He saw, by the expression of Walter Lord's face, that he had made a bull's-eye. The little man leaned forward and spoke with enthusiasm. "There's the best fishing to be found in the Catskills just beyond that meadow over there," he pointed out of the window. "You can't see the stream from here, on account of the tall grass, but it's fine, open fishing and just full of trout. Of course they're not very large, but along at the beginning of the season I caught one that weighed two pounds. Yes, sir. He was a beauty. And there are more of 'em, if you know the pools. I could show you----" After that, Peter had things pretty much his own way. The talk ran largely on flies and tackle. ("He was sure to be a fly fisherman, if he fished at all, the good old sport," thought Peter, smiling at his host.) Peter told a story of some wonderful fishing he had once had, up in Nova Scotia, and Lord capped it with an experience of his in the Adirondacks when he was a boy--and so the minutes flew. There was no further question as to Peter's spending the night there. The lonely old man was too eager for society, and too trusting and unsophisticated to raise any objections to the harbouring of an unheralded guest, particularly since the guest was a fisherman, and a fly fisherman, at that. If Walter Lord had any idea that Mr. Clancy had come to Hobart Falls with a purpose other than to investigate the fishing possibilities of that region, his curiosity on the subject was completely held in check by his innate courtesy.