shoulders. Then I took a three-pronged fork firmly bound to a rod with cord, and a piece of canvas kerchief, with a lump of bread inside it; and so went into the pebbly water, trying to think how warm it was. For more than a mile all down the Lynn stream, scarcely a stone I left unturned, being thoroughly skilled in the tricks of the loach, and knowing how he hides himself For being greyspotted, and clear to see through, and something like a cuttle fish, only more substantial, he will stay quite still, where a streak of weed is in the rapid water, hoping to be overlooked, nor caring even to wag his tail. Then being disturbed he flips away, like whalebone from the finger, and hies to a shelf of stone, and lies with his sharp head poked in under it; or sometimes he bellies him into the mud and only shows his back-ridge. And that is the time to spear him nicely, holding the fork very gingerly, and allowing for the bent of it, which comes to pass, I know not how, at the tickle of air and water.
Or if your loach should not be abroad, when first you come to look for him, but keeping snug in his little home, then you may see him come forth amazed at the quivering of the shingles, and oar himself and look at you, and then dart upstream, like a little grey streak; and then you must try to mark him in, and follow very daintily. So after that, in a sandy place, you steal up behind his tail to him, so that he cannot set eys on you, for his head is up-stream always, and there you see him abiding still, clear, and mild, and affable. Then, as he looks so innocent, you make full sure to prog him well, in spite of the wry of the water, and the sun making elbows to every thing, and the trembling of your fingers. But when you gird at him lovingly, and have as good as gotten him, lo! in the goby of the river he is gone as a shadow goes, and only a little cloud of mud curls away from the prong he should have been on.
A long way down that limpid water, chill and bright as an iceberg, went my little self that day, on man's choice errand—destruction. All the young fish seemed to know that I was one who had taken out God's certificate, and meant to have the value of it; every one of them was aware, that we desolate more than replenish the earth. For a cow might come and look into the water, and put her yellow lips down; a kingfisher, like a blue arrow, might shoot through the dark alleys over the channel, or sit on a dipping withy-bough, with his beak sunk into his breast-feathers; even an otter might float down-stream, likening himself to a log of wood, with his flat head flush with the water top, and his oily eyes peering quietly; and yet no panic would seize other life, as it does when a sample of man comes.
Now let not any one suppose that I thought of these things when I was young, for I knew not the way to do it. And proud enough in truth I was, at the universal fear I spread in all those lonely places, where I myself must have been afraid, if any thing had come up to me. It is all very pretty to see the trees, big with their hopes of another year, though dumb as yet on the subject, and the waters murmuring gaiety, and the banks spread out with comfort; but a boy takes none of this to heart, unless he be meant for a poet (which no man ever can charge on me), and he would liefer have a good apple, or even a bad one, if he stole it.
