It was very still. The
old buggy and complacent horse were embalmed in a pungent aroma of
old leather and of stables that was entrancing; and a sweet smell
of grass and sap came to them in occasional long whiffs. There
was exhilaration in the very thought of being alive on that
odorous, still morning. The young blood went spanking in the
veins. Blix's cheeks were ruddy, her little dark-brown eyes
fairly coruscating with pleasure.
"Condy, isn't it all splendid?" she suddenly burst out.
"I feel regularly bigger," he declared solemnly. "I could do
anything a morning like this."
Then they came to the lake, and to Richardson's, where the farmer
lived who was also the custodian of the lake. The complacent
horse jogged back, and Condy and Blix set about the serious
business of the day. Condy had no need to show Richardson the
delightful sporting clerk's card. The old Yankee--his twang and
dry humor singularly incongruous on that royal morning--was
solicitude itself. He picked out the best boat on the beach for
them, loaned them his own anchor of railroad iron, indicated
minutely the point on the opposite shore off which the last big
trout had been "killed," and wetted himself to his ankles as he
pushed off the boat.
Condy took the oars. Blix sat in the stern, jointing the rods and
running the lines through the guides. She even baited the hooks
with the salt shrimp herself, and by nine o'clock they were at
anchor some forty feet off shore, and fishing, according to
Richardson's advice, "a leetle mite off the edge o' the weeds.
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