“Shall we go to Castle Beautiful, and read a story to the menagerie?”
“No, not yet. Let us try to hook old Joe.”
Old Joe was a monster pike, who lived in a monster pond or pool, big enough almost to be called a lake, for it covered three acres of ground, and one part of it, right in the centre, was said to be deep enough to bury the village church and steeple. It was down at the bottom of this deep dark hole that Joe lived.
Now it was somewhat funny, but nobody about Grayling House—with one solitary exception, namely, Peter the butler, who had been at the mansion, man and boy, for fifty years—could tell where this monster pike had come from, or when or why he had come.
The facts are these: the loch was fed by springs, and the only outlet for the water was a lead that had to pass over a big mill-wheel, that ground oats and barley for every one in the parish. The pike could not have come over the mill-wheel. Again, he had not been there ten years, and as he weighed, to all appearance, full thirty pounds, he must have been a monster when he got there.
Captain Lyle, Leonard’s and Effie’s father, believed he had scrambled over the grass some dark, dewy night, and taken up his quarters in the loch. This was strange if true, and it might have been, because, at the time the pike first appeared, a tenant of the same kind was missed from a deep tree-shaded pool in the river.
The country people, however, would not share the captain’s belief. There was something uncanny about the beast, they averred, and the less any one had to do with him the better.
He was a very matter-of-fact pike, at all events; for no sooner had he taken possession of his new quarters than he proceeded at once to turn out all the old tenants. Or rather—to speak more to the point—he turned them in, for he ate them. Captain Lyle had, years before the reign of this king-pike, stocked the water with trout, and they had done well, but now none were ever seen.
Sometimes the pike condescended to show himself, or even to take a bait, when some person more daring and less superstitious than his fellows tried to catch him. More than once he had been pulled above the water, but disappeared again, hook and all, with a splash.