Fish away."
And yet, methinks, with the "poetry of earth," something is mingled now that sounds not like the music of waters, the song of birds, or the fluttering of a butterfly's wings—no, nor was it a hymn in praise of tackle-makers' carelessness. Let us hope that the "recording angel" for the day was once a keen sportsman, and appreciated, therefore, the extenuating circumstances of the case. Eventually the fly is replaced, and the campaign continued.
By lunch-time we reach one of the wooden shanties, with which it is becoming the custom on these streams to provide for temporary shelter. There is not a fish moving, and for the present it is useless to flog the water. Sandwiches and a pipe fill the interlude; and by-and-by the keeper, a shrewd, wooden-visaged, terrier-looking countryman, suddenly drops upon us (after the fashion of keepers), as it were, from the clouds. Locke, in his way, is a type, and his utterances occasionally have a refreshing dryness.
"Marning sir, marning sir," he says cheerily, laying a six-pound jack on the grass to leeward of the hut (for wind spoils the look of fish), and depositing his "rod," a bamboo pole furnished with wire noose, beside it. "Have you caught anything?"
"No, nothing; it's too bright."
"It is so; 'sides, the rise was over afore you come. I eyed you coming with my glass. There was a few fish feeding 'tween nine and ten this marning. I wish you'd been here."
"We came in for the tail of the rise. How did you get the jack?"
"I noosed un, sir, I allus nooses 'em. You can't get 'em out with the net, they's too artful. They lies right close on the ground, and lets the net rub over 'em."
Incited to continue, Locke plunges into a dissertation on the art of snaring jack, against which he is very naturally the sworn foe. He proudly recounts how he one day removed eighteen of these cannibals from his water, and, on another occasion, snared a leviathan of nineteen pounds eight ounces. Every now and then producing from an inner pocket a small telescope, the lens of which he polishes on his velveteen cuff, he pauses to reconnoitre suspiciously some distant figures in Nun's Walk, near which he has a small backwater full of "store" trout, that cause him a good deal of anxiety.