.

.

As for me I'm going down to the Brier Water to look into it.

If there are any trout there foolish enough to bite at those gaudy-feathered hooks I'll call you--" "I'm going with you," he said, rising to his feet.

She smilingly ignored his offered hands and sprang erect unaided.
The Brier Water, a cold, deep, leisurely stream, deserved its name.
Rising from a small spring-pond almost at the foot of Silverside lawn, it wound away through tangles of bull-brier and wild-rose, under arches of weed and grass and clustered thickets of mint, north through one of the strange little forests where it became a thread edged with a duck-haunted bog, then emerging as a clear deep stream once more it curved sharply south, recurved north again, and flowed into Shell Pond which, in turn, had an outlet into the Sound a mile east of Wonder Head.
If anybody ever haunted it with hostile designs upon its fishy denizens, Austin at least never did.