“Hoigh! Yap,—hoigh! there he is,” said Tom, clapping his hands, as the little black snout made its arrowy course to the opposite bank. “Seize him, lad! seize him!”
Yap agitated his ears and wrinkled his brows, but declined to plunge, trying whether barking would not answer the purpose just as well.
“Ugh! you coward!” said Tom, and kicked him over, feeling humiliated as a sportsman to possess so poor-spirited an animal. Bob abstained from remark and passed on, choosing, however, to walk in the shallow edge of the overflowing river by way of change.
“He’s none so full now, the Floss isn’t,” said Bob, as he kicked the water up before him, with an agreeable sense of being insolent to it. “Why, last ’ear, the meadows was all one sheet o’ water, they was.”
“Ay, but,” said Tom, whose mind was prone to see an opposition between statements that were really accordant,—“but there was a big flood once, when the Round Pool was made. I know there was, ’cause father says so. And the sheep and cows all drowned, and the boats went all over the fields ever such a way.”
“I don’t care about a flood comin’,” said Bob; “I don’t mind the water, no more nor the land. I’d swim, I would.”
“Ah, but if you got nothing to eat for ever so long?” said Tom, his imagination becoming quite active under the stimulus of that dread. “When I’m a man, I shall make a boat with a wooden house on the top of it, like Noah’s ark, and keep plenty to eat in it,—rabbits and things,—all ready. And then if the flood came, you know, Bob, I shouldn’t mind. And I’d take you in, if I saw you swimming,” he added, in the tone of a benevolent patron.
“I aren’t frighted,” said Bob, to whom hunger did not appear so appalling. “But I’d get in an’ knock the rabbits on th’ head when you wanted to eat ’em.”
“Ah, and I should have halfpence, and we’d play at heads-and-tails,” said Tom, not contemplating the possibility that this recreation might have fewer charms for his mature age. “I’d divide fair to begin with, and then we’d see who’d win.”
“I’ve got a halfpenny o’ my own,” said Bob, proudly, coming out of the water and tossing his halfpenny in the air. “Yeads or tails?”