le field-mouse, struggling desperately in a vain
effort to swim back to the shore. Once before our friend had swallowed a
mouse whole, just as you would take an oyster from the half-shell, and
he knew that they were very nice, indeed. He made a rush for the unlucky
little animal, and in another second he would have had him; but just
then the big bully came swaggering up with an air which seemed to say:
"That's my meat. You get out of this!"

Our friend obeyed, the big fellow gave a leap and seized the mouse, and
then--his time had come. He fought bravely, but he was fairly hooked,
and in a few minutes he lay out on the bank, gasping for breath,
flopping wildly about, and fouling his beautiful sides with sand and
dirt. If he had understood English he might have overheard an argument
which immediately took place between the angler and a girl, and which
began something like this:

"There!" in a triumphant tone; "who says mice aren't good bait? This is
the biggest trout that's been caught in this stream for years."

"Oh, George, don't kill him! He's so pretty! Put him back in the water."

"Put him back in the water? Well, I should say not! What do you take me
for?"

Evidently the girl took him for one who could be easily influenced by
the right person, for she kept up the argument, and in the end she won
her case. The trout was tossed back into the stream, where he gave
himself a shake or two, to get rid of the sand, and then swam away,
apparently as well as ever. But girls don't always know what is good for
trout. It would really have been kinder if the angler had hit him over
the head with the butt of his fishing-rod, and then carried him home and
put him in the frying-pan. In his struggles a part of the mucus had been
rubbed from his body, and that always means trouble for a fish. A few
days later our friend met him again, and noticed that a curious growth
had appeared on his back and sides--a growth which bore a faint
resemblance to the bloom on a peach, and which had taken the exact shape
of the prints of the angler's fingers. The fungus had got him. He was
dying, slowly but surely, and within a week he turned over on his back
and drifted away down the stream. A black bear found him whirling round
and round in a little eddy under the bank, and that was the end of him.

And so our friend became the King of the Trout Stream.

You are not to suppose, however, that he paid very much attention to his
subjects, or tha