“Now we’ll see who’ll get the first bite,” said Daddy Martin, when the hooks were baited and tossed over the side of the boat. “We must all sit quietly so as not to scare the fish.”
“Trouble would like it here,” said Jan, in a low voice, when she had waited patiently for some time for a bite. “He loves the water and lots of times he fishes with a bent pin in our brook at home.”
“Yes, and he falls in, too,” added Teddy. “But we mustn’t talk and scare the fish. Must we, Daddy?”
“Well, perhaps it would be better to keep quiet, though I hardly imagine a fish can hear a whisper. Still it’s just as well Trouble stayed at home with his mother. He’d be wiggling about and maybe he’d fall out of the boat.”
In silence they all watched their lines, each one hoping for a bite. Suddenly Ted gave his pole an upward jerk. So unexpectedly did he do it that he fell over backward off the seat, and he might have toppled into the lake, only that his father quickly put out his arm and caught the little boy.
“Why, The-o-dore!” exclaimed Mr. Martin, in the way Ted’s mother sometimes spoke to him. “What are you trying to do?”
“I—I had a fish on my hook, and I pulled up quick so he wouldn’t get off. But he did. Oh, he was a big one!”
“But you nearly went overboard,” returned his father, “and then you would have been shipwrecked, whether you wanted to or not. Besides, it wasn’t a fish you caught.”
“It wasn’t?” cried Ted. “What was it? It pulled like a fish.”
“It was that big bunch of weeds,” went on Mr. Martin, laughing and pointing to some green ones slowly floating away from the boat. “Your hook caught in them, Teddy, and the motion of the water, down near the bottom of the lake, made it feel, I suppose, as though a fish were nibbling. But never pull your line up so suddenly as you did, even if you think you have a fish.”