only it came more quietly down, not
being troubled with stairs and steps, as the fortune of the Lynn is, but
gliding smoothly and forcibly, as if upon some set purpose.

Hereupon I drew up and thought, and reason was much inside me; because
the water was bitter cold, and my little toes were aching. So on the
bank I rubbed them well with a sprout of young sting-nettle, and having
skipped about awhile, was kindly inclined to eat a bit.

Now all the turn of all my life hung upon that moment. But as I sat
there munching a crust of Betty Muxworthy's sweet brown bread, and a bit
of cold bacon along with it, and kicking my little red heels against the
dry loam to keep them warm, I knew no more than fish under the fork what
was going on over me. It seemed a sad business to go back now and tell
Annie there were no loaches; and yet it was a frightful thing, knowing
what I did of it, to venture, where no grown man durst, up the Bagworthy
water. And please to recollect that I was only a boy in those days, fond
enough of anything new, but not like a man to meet it.

However, as I ate more and more, my spirit arose within me, and I
thought of what my father had been, and how he had told me a hundred
times never to be a coward. And then I grew warm, and my little heart
was ashamed of its pit-a-patting, and I said to myself, "now if father
looks, he shall see that I obey him." So I put the bag round my back
again, and buckled my breeches far up from the knee, expecting deeper
water, and crossing the Lynn, went stoutly up under the branches which
hang so dark on the Bagworthy river.

I found it strongly over-woven, turned, and torn with thicket-wood, but
not so rocky as the Lynn, and more inclined to go evenly. There were
bars of chafed stakes stretched from the sides half-way across the
current, and light outriders of pithy weed, and blades of last year's
water-grass trembling in the quiet places, like a spider's threads, on
the transparent stillness, with a tint of olive moving it. And here and
there the sun came in, as if his light was sifted, making dance upon the
waves, and shadowing the pebbles.

Here, although affrighted often by the deep, dark places, and feeling
that every step I took might never be taken backward, on the whole I
had very comely sport of loaches, trout, and minnows, forking some, and
tickling some, and driving others to shallow nooks, whence I could bail
them ashore. Now, if you have ever been fishing, you