e chances are a thousand to one that you will part your
line and lose the best end of it, and your game along with it.

You can do this, if you choose, of course--this is a free country; but
if that is your way of fishing, you had better give up any little pet
idea that may be lurking about you, that heaven made you for a
fisherman. Perhaps you might make a fair superintendent of school
machines, but you ought not to fish!

Or, you may despise the fish, if you choose, and when he has left you,
you may gloat over the fact that "anyhow you have stuck something into
his gullet that will stay there, and that he can't get away from." You
may hope that the trailing line will tangle to a bush and hang the
creature. All this you may do, and yet, of what avail is it all? It
benefits neither you nor the fish!

But if you know your business you can give your game his own way,
suiting your motion to his, till you wear him out, and then he is
yours. That is good fishing, and the good thing about it is that it
gets the game!

"Dodd" was hooked. His staying away from school was the first tug that
he gave the line that caught him. Mr. Bright let him run. He ran for
three days, and then gave up on that tack. The fisher reeled in the
line and watched for the next break.

CHAPTER XII.

But on Thursday morning "Dodd" came to school again. This time he went
to the other extreme in the matter of clothes, and came into the room
dressed like a dandy. He had failed to make a sensation, so far, and
he had not been used to that sort of thing recently. For years he had
been the cause of something unusual, every few hours, and in ways about
as he chose. As it was now, he seemed to have lost his knack at this
art, and to have fallen into the condition of an ordinary individual,
concerning whom no one cared particularly.

This annoyed him greatly. He had come to think he was of some great
consequence in the world, by reason of his being so frequently talked
to, and prayed over, and reasoned with, and pampered in a thousand ways
by those who were really afraid of him; and now, to be set aside
without a word or a look, except such as all other pupils got, this was
a sore stroke to his vanity.

You see, everybody grows proud of his own attainments, in course of
time, no matter what they are, and is anxious to have his fellows
appreciate them to their fullest extent, and to acknowledge their
excellence in his particular case