IN WHICH I SAVE A USEFUL LIFE
Though I had said good-bye to the inn, the stream and I did not part company at the inn-door, but continued for the best part of a morning to be fellow-travellers.Indeed, having led me to one pleasant adventure, its purpose, I afterwards realised, was to lead me to another, and then to go about its own bright business.
I don't think either of us had much idea where we were or whither we were bound.Our guiding principle seemed to be to get as much sunshine as possible, and to find the easiest road.We avoided dull sandy levels and hard rocky places, with the same instinctive dexterity.We gloomed together through dark dingles, and came out on sunny reaches with the same gilded magnificence.
There are days when every stream is Pactolus and every man is Croesus, and thanks to that first and greatest of all alchemists, the sun, the morning I write of was a morning when to breathe was gold and to see was silver.And to breathe and see was all one asked.It was the first of May, and the world shone like a great illuminated letter with which that father of artists, the sun, was making splendid his missal of the seasons.
The month of May was ever his tour de force.Each year he has strained and stimulated his art to surpass himself, seeking ever a finer and a brighter gold, a more celestial azure.Never had his gold been so golden, his azure so dazzlingly clear and deep as on this particular May morning; while his fancy simply ran riot in the marginal decorations of woodland and spinney, quaint embroidered flowers and copses full of exquisitely painted and wonderfully trained birds of song.It was indeed a day for nature to be proud of.So seductive was the sunshine that even the shy trout leapt at noonday, eager apparently to change his silver for gold.
O silver fish in the silver stream, O golden fish in the golden gleam, Tell me, tell me, tell me true, Shall I find my girl if I follow you?
I suppose the reader never makes nonsense rhymes from sheer gladness of heart,--nursery doggerel to keep time with the rippling of the stream, or the dancing of the sun, or the beating of his heart; the gibberish of delight.As I hummed this nonsense, a trout at least three pounds in weight, whom you would know again anywhere, leapt a yard out of the water, and I took it, in my absurd, sun-soaked heart, as a good omen, as though he had said, "Follow and see."I had no will but to follow, no desire but to see.All the same, though I affected to take him seriously, I had little suspicion how much that trout was to mean to me,--yes, within the course of a very few moments.Indeed, I had hardly strolled on for another quarter of a mile, when I was suddenly aroused from wool-gathering by his loud cries for help.Looking up, I saw him flashing desperately in mid-air, a lovely foot of writhing silver.In another second he was swung through the sunlight, and laid out breathing hard in a death-bed of buttercups and daisies.
There was not a moment to be lost, if I were to repay the debt of gratitude which in a flash I had seen that I owed him.
"Madam," I said, breathlessly springing forward, as a heavenly being was coldly tearing the hook from the gills of the unlucky trout, "though I am a stranger, will you do me a great favour?
It is a matter of life or death..."
She looked up at me with some surprise, but with a fine fearless glance, and almost immediately said, "Certainly, what can Ido?"
"Spare the life of that trout--"
