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 will not wonder
that I was led on, forgetting all about danger, and taking no heed of
the time, but shouting in a childish way whenever I caught a 'whacker'
(as we called a big fish at Tiverton); and in sooth there were very
fine loaches here, having more lie and harbourage than in the rough Lynn
stream, though not quite so large as in the Lowman, where I have even
taken them to the weight of half a pound.

But in answer to all my shouts there never was any sound at all, except
of a rocky echo, or a scared bird hustling away, or the sudden dive of a
water-vole; and the place grew thicker and thicker, and the covert grew
darker above me, until I thought that the fishes might have good chance
of eating me, instead of my eating the fishes.

For now the day was falling fast behind the brown of the hill-tops, and
the trees, being void of leaf and hard, seemed giants ready to beat me.
And every moment as the sky was clearing up for a white frost, the cold
of the water got worse and worse, until I was fit to cry with it. And
so, in a sorry plight, I came to an opening in the bushes, where a great
black pool lay in front of me, whitened with s