he swallows the bait
and digests it before the boy pulls him out, he will be just so much
ahead. Finally the boy thinks of his bait, and pulls it out, and the
bullhead is landed on the bank, and the boy cuts him open to get the hook
out. Some fish only take the bait gingerly, and are only caught around the
selvage of the mouth, and they are comparatively easy to dislodge. Not so
with the bullhead. He says if liver is a good thing you can't have too
much of it, and it tastes good all the way down. The boy gets down on his
knees to dissect the bullhead, and get his hook, and it may be that the
boy swears. It would not be astonishing, though he must feel, when he gets
his hook out of the hidden recesses of the bullhead, like the minister
that took up a collection and didn't get a cent, though he expressed his
thanks at getting his hat back. There is one drawback to the bullhead, and
that is his horns. We doubt if a boy ever descended into the patent
insides of a bullhead, to mine for Limerick hooks, that did not, before
his work was done, run a horn into his vital parts. But the boy seems to
expect it, and the bullhead enjoys it. We have seen a bullhead lay on the
bank and become dry, and to all appearances dead to all that was going on,
and when the boy sat down on him and got a horn in his elbow, and yelled
murder, the bullhead would grin from ear to ear, and wag his tail as
though applauding for an _end core_.

The bullhead never complains. We have seen a boy take a dull knife and
proceed to follow a fish line down a bullhead from his head to the end of
his subsequent anatomy, and all the time there would be an expression of
sweet peace on the countenance of the bullhead, as though he
enjoyed it. If we were preparing a picture representing "Resignation," for
a chromo to give to subscribers, and wished to represent a scene of
suffering in which the sufferer was light hearted, and seemed to recognize
that all was for the best, we should take for the subject a bullhead, with
a boy searching with a knife for a long lost fish hook.

The bullhead is a fish that has no scales, but in lieu thereof is a fine
India rubber skin, that is as far ahead of fiddle string material for
strength and durability as possible. The meat of the bullhead is not as
choice as that of the mackerel, but it fills up a stomach just as well,
and the _Sun_ insists that the fish commissioners shall drop the hatching
of aristocratic fish and give the bul