It was a windy, shadowy evening.
A heavily clouded sunset lay low and red in the west.

A solitary angler stood casting his fly at a turn in the stream where the backwater lay still and deep under an overhanging bank.

A girl (myself) standing on the bank, invisible to the fisherman beneath, waited eagerly to see the trout rise.
The moment came; the fish took the fly.
Sometimes on the little level strip of sand at the foot of the bank, sometimes (when the stream turned again) in the shallower water rushing over its rocky bed, the angler followed the captured trout, now letting the line run out and now winding it in again, in the difficult and delicate process of "playing" the fish.

Along the bank I followed to watch the contest of skill and cunning between the man and the trout.
I had lived long enough with my uncle Starkweather to catch some of his enthusiasm for field sports, and to learn something, especially, of the angler's art.

Still following the stranger, with my eyes intently fixed on every movement of his rod and line, and with not so much as a chance fragment of my attention to spare for the rough path along which I was walking, I stepped by chance on the loose overhanging earth at the edge of the bank, and fell into the stream in an instant.
The distance was trifling, the water was shallow, the bed of the river was (fortunately for me) of sand.