And delivers his staff to the next place.”
He delivered his—no, it was not a stick, but a “tommy” hat, all ornamented with fishing-flies, and dripping with rain, to anybody that would hang it up, and sank into a chair, saying, mournfully:
“You can’t see the salmon.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s at the bottom of the loch. He got away.”
“Got away!”
“Yes, after giving us a run of a full hour.”
“An hour and five minutes by my watch,” added Sunny’s papa, who looked as dejected as the other two. Though no salmon-fisher, he had been so excited by the sport that he had sat drenched through and through, in the stern of the boat, and afterward declared “he didn’t know it had rained.”
“Such a splendid fish he was,—twenty-five pounds at least.”
“Twenty,” suggested some one, who was put down at once with scorn.