r fish. When they saw those trout, they all jumped up from
the table. Addison and Halse had never caught anything which could
compare with them for size; both of the boys stared in astonishment.

"Where in the world did you catch those whopping trout?" was then the
question which we had to answer in detail.

Kate carried three of them home with her; and we had six for our share.
The Old Squire dressed two of the largest; and grandmother rolled them
in meal and fried them with pork for our supper. I thought at the time
that I had never tasted anything one half as good in my life!

Next morning Addison got up at half past four and having hastily milked
his two cows, went over to the old mill-pond, to try his own hand at
fishing there. He found Tom Edwards there already; but neither of them
caught a trout, nor saw one. Addison went again a day or two after; and
the story having got abroad, more than twenty persons fished there
during the next fortnight, but caught no trout.

Evidently it was a transient school. I never caught a trout in the
mill-pond, afterwards; although the following year Addison made a great
catch in a branch of the Foy stream below the dam under somewhat
peculiar circumstances.

At the far end of the dam, a hundred feet from the flume, there was an
"apron," beneath a waste-way, where formerly the overflow of water went
out and found its way for a hundred and fifty yards, perhaps, by another
channel along the foot of a steep bank; then, issuing through a dense
willow thicket, it joined the main stream from the flume.

Water rarely flowed here now, except in time of freshets, or during the
spring and fall rains; and there was such a prodigious tangle of alder,
willow, clematis and other vines that for years no one had penetrated
it. From a fisherman's point of view there seemed no inducement to do
so, since this secondary channel appeared to be dry for most of the
time.

In point of fact, however, and unknown to us, there was a very deep hole
at the foot of the high bank where the channel was obstructed by a
ledge. The hole thus formed was thirty or forty feet in length, and at
the deepest place under the bank the water was six or seven feet in
depth; but such was the tangle of brush above, below and all about it
that one would never have suspected its existence.

An experienced and observing fisherman would have noted, however, that
always, even in midsummer, there was a tiny rill of water issui