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Every two hours after that Joe, who wasn’t sick worth mentionin’, had to swallow a dose of horrid stuff, and pretty soon he took to his bed, and Johnny he jist played round and got well in the nat’ral way. Joe’s mother kept up the treatment, gittin’ up in the night to feed that stuff to him; but the poor little boy got wuss and wuss, and one mornin’ he says to his mother, says he: ‘Mother, I guess I’m goin’ to die, and I’d ruther do that than take any more of that medicine, and I wish you’d call Johnny and we’ll trade names back agen, and if he don’t want to come and do it, you kin tell him he kin keep the old minkskin I gave him to boot, on account of his name havin’ a Wesley in it.’ ‘Trade names,’ says his mother, ‘what do you mean by that?’ And then he told her what he and Johnny had done. ‘And did you ever tell anybody about this?’ says she. ‘Nobody but Dr. Barnes,’ says he. ‘After that I got sick and forgot it.’ When my sister heard that, an idee struck into her like you put a fork into an apple dumplin’. Traded names, and told the doctor! She’d all along thought it strange that the boy that seemed wuss should be turned out, and the other one put under treatment; but it wasn’t fur her to set up her opinion agen that of a man like Dr. Barnes. Down she went, in about seventeen jumps, to where Eli Timmins, the hired man, was ploughin’ in the corn. ‘Take that horse out of that,’ she hollers, ‘and you may kill him if you have to, but git Dr. Barnes here before my little boy dies.’ When the doctor come he heard the story, and looked at the sick youngster, and then says he: ‘If he’d kept his minkskin, and not hankered after a Wesley to his name, he’d a had a better time of it. Stop the treatment, and he’ll be all right.’ Which she did; and he was. Now it seems to me that this is a good deal like your case. You’ve had to take a lot of medicine that didn’t belong to you, and I guess it’s made you feel pretty bad; but I’ve told my gals to stop the treatment, and you’ll be all right in the mornin’. Good-night. Your candlestick is on the kitchen table.”

For two days longer I remained in this neighborhood, wandering alone over the hills, and up the mountain-sides, and by the brooks, which tumbled and gurgled through the lonely forest. Each evening I brought home a goodly supply of trout, but never a great one like the noble fellow for which I angled in the meadow stream.

On the morning of my departure I stood on the porch with old Peter waiting for the arrival of the mail driver, who was to take me to the nearest railroad town.

“I don’t want to say nothin’,” remarked the old man, “that would keep them fellers with the jinted poles from stoppin’ at my house when they comes to these parts a-fishin’. I ain’t got no objections to their poles; ’tain’t that. And I don’t mind nuther their standin’ off, and throwin’ their flies as fur as they’ve a mind to; that’s not it. And it ain’t even the way they have of worryin’ their fish. I wouldn’t do it myself, but if they like it, that’s their business. But what does rile me is the cheeky way in which they stand up and say that there isn’t no decent way of fishin’ but their way. And that to a man that’s ketched more fish, of more different kinds, with more game in ’em, and had more fun at it, with a lot less money, and less tomfoolin’ than any fishin’ feller that ever come here and talked to me like an old cat tryin’ to teach a dog to ketch rabbits. No, sir; agen I say that I don’t take no money fur entertainin’ the only man that ever come out here to go a-fishin’ in a plain, Christian way. But if you feel tetchy about not payin’ nothin’, you kin send me one of them poles in three pieces, a good strong one, that’ll lift Barney Sloat’s trout, if ever I hook him.”

I sent him the rod; and next summer I am going out to see him use it.