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Show FISHERMAN'S LUCK to the stream; and where I lost a bigger one. I remember the pool where there were plenty of good fish last year, and wonder whether they are there now. Better things thnn these I remember: the companions with whom I have followed the strenm in days long past; the rendezvous with a comrade at the place where the rustic bridge crosses the brook ; the hours of sweet converse beside the friendship-fire; the meeting at twilight with my lady Graygown and the children, who have come down by the wood-road to walk home with me. Surely it is pleasant to follow an old stream. Flowers grow along its banks which are not to be found anywhere else in the wide world. "There is rosemary, that 's for remembrance; and there is pansies, that 's for thoughts!" One May evening, a couple of years since, I was angling in the Swiftwater, and came upon Joseph Jefferson, stretched out on a large rock in midstream, and casting the fly down a long pool. He had passed the threescore years and ten, but 9!68 THE OPEN FIRE he was as eager and as happy as a boy in his fishing. "You here!" I cried. "What good fortune brought you into these waters?" "Ah," he answered, "I fished this brook forty-five years ago. It was in the Paradise Valley that I first thought of Rip Van Winkle. I wanted to come back again for the sake of old times." But what has all this to do with an open fire? I will tell you. It is at the places along the stream, where the little flames of love and friendship have been kindled in bygone days, that the past returns most vividly. These are the altars of remembrance. It is strange how long a small fire will leave its mark. The charred sticks, the black coals, do not decay easily. If they lie well up the bank, out of reach of the spring floods, they will stay there for years. If you have chanced to build a rough fireplace of stones from the brook, it seems almost as if it would last forever. There is a mossy knoll beneath a great butternuttree on the Swiftwater where such a fireplace was ~69 |