Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE AUTOCRAT OF THE EDDY. GRAPEVINES and moonseeds and Virginia creepers tangle their branches together over the prostrate form of the old lichen-covered mill. The thump and rumble of the soggy wheel have not been heard in the quiet little valley for many a year, and the water splashes over the drippy alga-decked shaft and through the holes in the dam, throwing clouds of cooling spray into the warm sunshine. Collecting its scattered forces the stream bounds off among the rocks, slides under the ferns, and tarries for an eddy at the bend where the scraggy hemlock leans, giving the flecks of foam time to circle about in the shade before they are whirled away down stream again, Deeply sunken beneath the hemlock’s gnarled root is a shelving drift boulder of gneiss, and under the shelf a big trout has lived for many seasons. His colors are dark, his protruding under-jaw is hooked, his eye is fierce, and his manner is aggressive. No other living thing of his size or less would dare claim a share of the eddy. The beautiful despot has caught every baby trout that ventured so far up or down stream this year, and rumor has it that he swallowed one of his best children at a single gulp. The timid little dace hide behind the stones in shallow water and make eyes at him, but one by one he takes them to his bosom and shows them the folly of their ways. When a miller balances on the tip of a waving fern frond near the brink, the old trout throws water at it with his tail and then whirls it under, leaving a single white wing to float off down stream and make the other trouts mouths water. That shows his disposition. The hemlock has stood on the bank for a couple of centuries and the trout haslived under it for a decade, but I have no dates for the boulder and the stream. When the …