“You’d better try yourself,” said Rob. “You people talk about the fish in the Parana, but I’ve seen more alligators than sprats.”
“Shall I catch one?” said the new-comer.
“Yes; let’s see you.”
The lad nodded and showed his white teeth.
“Give me an orange,” he said.
Rob rose and stepped softly to the awning, thrust his hand into a basket beneath the shelter, and took out three, returning to give one to the young Italian and one to Shaddy, reserving the last for himself and beginning to peel it at once.
Giovanni, alias Joe—who had passed nearly the whole of his life on his father’s schooner, which formed one of the little fleet of Italian vessels trading between Monte Video and Assuncion, the traffic being largely carried on by the Italian colony settled in the neighbourhood of the former city—took his orange, peeled it cleverly with his thin brown fingers, tossed the skin overboard for it to be nosed about directly by a shoal of tiny fish, and then pulled it in half, picked up the gimp hook and shook his head, laid the hook back on the thwart, and pulled the orange apart once more, leaving two carpels, one side of which he skinned so as to bare the juicy pulp.
“The hook is too small,” said the boy quietly.
“Why, it’s a jack hook, such as we catch big pike with at home. But you’re not going to bait with that?”
“Yes,” said the lad, carefully thrusting the hook through the orange after passing it in by a piece of the skin which, for the first time, Rob saw he had left.