, mysterious, silly things. Alice always enjoys a rat
hunt until the rat is caught, but she hates fishing from beginning to
end. We boys have got to like it. We don't feel now as we did when we
turned off the water and stopped the competition of the competing
anglers. We had a grand day's fishing that day. I can't think what made
the miller so kind to us. Perhaps he felt a thrill of fellow-feeling in
his manly breast for his fellow-sportsmen, for he was a noble fisherman
himself.

We had glorious sport--eight roach, six dace, three eels, seven perch,
and a young pike, but he was so very young the miller asked us to put
him back, and of course we did.

"He'll live to bite another day," said the miller.

The miller's wife gave us bread and cheese and more Eiffel Tower
lemonade, and we went home at last, a little damp, but full of
successful ambition, with our fish on a string.

It had been a strikingly good time--one of those times that happen in
the country quite by themselves. Country people are much more friendly
than town people. I suppose they don't have to spread their friendly
feelings out over so many persons, so it's thicker, like a pound of
butter on one loaf is thicker than on a dozen. Friendliness in the
country is not scrape, like it is in London. Even Dicky and H. O. forgot
the affair of honor that had taken place in the morning. H. O. changed
rods with Dicky because H. O.'s was the best rod, and Dicky baited H.
O.'s hook for him, just like loving, unselfish brothers in Sunday-school
magazines.

We were talking fishlikely as we went along down the lane and through
the cornfield and the cloverfield, and then we came to the other lane
where we had seen the Baby. The tramps were gone, and the perambulator
was gone, and, of course, the Baby was gone too.

"I wonder if those gypsies _had_ stolen the Baby," Noel said, dreamily.
He had not fished much, but he had made a piece of poetry. It was this:

"How I wish
I was a fish.
I would not look
At your hook,
But lie still and be cool
At the bottom of the pool.
And when you went to look
At your cruel hook,
You would not find me there,
So there!"

"If they did steal the Baby," Noel went on, "they will be tracked by the
lordly perambulator. You can disguise a baby in rags and walnut juice,
but there isn't any disguise dark enough to conceal a perambulator's
person."

"You might disguise it as a wheelbarrow," said