Page:Fishin' Jimmy Slosson.djvu/17

 jest where I ketched the big pick'ril," he said quietly. "I seen it nigh a foot high, an' it 's juicier and livin'er than them dead sticks in your book." At our request he accompanied the unbelieving botanist and myself to the spot; and there, looking down through the sunlit water, we saw great patches of that rare and long-lost plant of the Cruciferæ known to science as Subularia aquatica. For forty years it had hidden itself away, growing and blossoming and casting abroad its tiny seeds in its watery home, unseen, or at least unnoticed, by living soul, save by the keen, soft, limpid eyes of Fishin' Jimmy. And he knew the trees and shrubs so well: the alder and birch from which as a boy he cut his simple, pliant pole; the shad-blow and iron-wood (he called them, respectively, sugarplum and hard-hack) which he used for the more ambitious rods of maturer