Nelly now called to Martin that the lines were ready, for Dolly had just finished tying on the last pin. He gathered up the bait he had found beneath the stones, and went towards the two other girls. He thought, on consideration, that he might fish for a short time, while waiting to see if a wagon approached on the road. If none did so within the allotted half hour, he made up his mind to go home. He blamed himself now for having changed the destination of the party.
"Here's my line," cried Dolly, holding it out at the end of her pole, "and now all that I and the fishes wait for is a worm."
Martin fastened one on Dolly's pin, one on Nelly's likewise, and one on the line he intended for himself.
"Come, Bessie," said Nelly, as she flung her line into the water, "come try your luck."
"Bessie does not care about fishing," said Martin kindly, "do not press her if she does not wish it."
The pond was well stocked with a variety of small fishes, many of which were considered good eating by the farmers in the neighborhood. As scarcely any one ever took the trouble, however, to go after them, they were hardly acquainted with hooks or lines, and they were, consequently, all the more easily caught. Martin said he had never seen such hungry fishes before. They snapped at the bait the moment it was lowered to them, oftentimes carrying it entirely off, hook and all.
Once, and the children could scarcely believe it when they saw it, a fish called a bull-head leaped at least an inch above the water and tried to swallow the end of Dolly's line, which she was in the act of raising, to replace the pin and worm which some of his greedy kindred had just taken away.
Martin told the girls that if they would place themselves with him on an old trunk of a tree that apparently had fallen years before into the edge of the pond, they would probably find it to be a better position from which to throw their lines than the shore on which they had stood at first. "For," said he, "the larger fish do not like to venture into such shallow water." The trunk, however, was covered with moist moss, which made it very slippery, and Nelly came so near losing her balance and falling in, as she walked up it, that she concluded to remain where she was. Martin and Dolly did not meet with the same difficulty, however, and very soon they discovered that the nibbles were far more frequent than before. Martin kept a twig on which he slipped the fish as soon as caught, and then hung it on a branch of the moss-covered trunk. Bessie had begun to look on the proceedings with interest, feeling almost as sorry as her companions as a ravenous bull-head occasionally carried off the hooks, when she heard a noise on the road as of wheels. She ran to the bushes which, divided it from the pond, and putting her little face through, saw that the miller who lived in the village was passing with three or four large sacks of meal in a wagon drawn by a pair of horses. He was going the wrong way, but the thought occurred to her to stop him and ask how long it would be before he should return, and if he should do so by the same road. The miller was a stout, good-natured looking man, with an old hat and coat as white as his meal bags. He seemed astonished enough at seeing Bessie's head pop so suddenly out of the bushes in that lonely place.
"Why, Bessie," said he, laughing, "if I hadn't been as bold as a lion, perhaps I might have mistaken you for a mermaid that had just sprung out of the pond to have a little private conversation with me. Yes, I shall come back by this road. I have got to deliver my meal at the first house on the left, and then I turn towards home again. Is that your party that I catch a glimpse of on the pond?"