Under Wolfe's Flag

Here's a beauty, Jack! "Hold him, Jamie, till I come!" "Come quickly then, old fellow--he's slipping away from me! Quick! Hang it, the fellow's gone! I've missed him, and----" "Splash!" The sentence was never finished, for Jamie, stepping too excitedly on a treacherous, moss-covered rock in mid-stream, slipped, and the next instant found himself sitting down, up to the armpits in the water which raced past him like a mill-stream. "Never mind," said his companion, when the laughter which greeted this mishap had subsided. "There's a likely spot, up under the fall there, where I've landed many a big fish; let's go and try it." This "likely spot," however, was a difficult one, and for any other soul in the tiny village of Burnside--these two young rascals excepted--an impossible one. There, right under the overhanging rocks, over which a cascade tumbled twenty feet, into a swirling pool which formed one of the deepest parts of the stream, was a narrow ledge, where the moss grew thick upon the wet, slippery rocks, but in the cracks and fissures beneath that ledge, many a lusty trout was hidden. While the two chums are wending their way to this "likely spot," which lay at a bend in the stream, just at the bottom of Hawk Woods, leaping from boulder to boulder as they crossed the broken stream, I will briefly introduce the reader to a little of their previous history. Jack Elliot and Jamie Stuart were aged respectively fifteen and fourteen years. Only a week ago these two sturdy lads had been soundly thrashed by Dr. Birch, for playing truant and indulging in the tempting but forbidden pastime of "tickling trout" in the laughing stream, which, descending from the blue moorlands above, sang its way down through the densely wooded slopes of Crow Hill.