Elsket by Thomas Nelson Page — Read

I found that my friend, "Doctor John," strange to relate of a fisherman, had not exaggerated the merits of the fishing. How they got there, two thousand feet above the lower valley, I don't know; but trout fairly swarmed in the little streams, which boiled among the rocks, and they were as greedy as if they had never seen a fly in their lives. I shortly became contemptuous toward anything under three pounds, and addressed myself to the task of defending my flies against the smaller ones, and keeping them only for the big fellows, which ran over three pounds -- the patriarchs of the streams. With these I had capital sport, for they knew every angle and hole, they sought every coign of vantage, and the rocks were so thick and so sharp that from the time one of these veterans took the fly, it was an equal contest which of us should come off victorious. I was often forced to rush splashing and floundering through the water to my waist to keep my line from being sawed, and as the water was not an hour from the green glaciers above, it was not always entirely pleasant.

I soon made firm friends with my hosts, and varied the monotony of catching three-pounders by helping them get in their hay for the winter. Elsket, poor thing, was, notwithstanding her apparently splendid physique, so delicate that she could no longer stand the fatigue of manual labor, any extra exertion being liable to bring on a recurrence of the heart-failure, from which she had suffered. I learned that she had had a violent hemorrhage two summers before, from which she had come near dying, and that the skill of my friend, the doctor, had doubtless saved her life. This was the hold he had on Olaf of the Mountain: this was the "small service" he had rendered them.