The Bobbsey twins at Cloverbank

by Laura Lee Hope

“Sometimes when the fish won’t bite on worms they will on grasshoppers,” suggested the hired man. “Just take another box with you and walk through the lower hay meadow. The grasshoppers are thick there. You can catch them in your hand as you walk along and pop them in the box. But you want to be careful how you do it.”

“Why, will grasshoppers bite?” asked Bert, though he had never heard of them doing that.

“No,” answered the hired man, with a laugh. “But after you catch one grasshopper and put it in the box, when you take off the cover to put in another, often the first one will jump out. And you can’t catch many fish on one hopper.”

“Oh, I see what you mean,” laughed Bert.

He found it just as Zeek had said. It was easy enough to grab a green grasshopper off a head of timothy grass in the hay field, but when he caught his second one and opened the box cover to slip the creature in, out jumped the first one.

But Bert made a prisoner of the second one, and when he had his third he was more careful in opening the box. He raised the lid only a little way, and through the crack he shoved the green insect. Soon he had enough, he thought, with the worms he had brought, and he made his way to the edge of the creek, picking out a spot where the water foamed and bubbled over the stony bottom.

As worms were easier to put on the hook than the grasshoppers, which were very lively, Bert baited with one of the crawling creatures and cast in his hook. The Bobbsey boy was about as patient as most lads, but when he had pulled out several times, thinking he had bites, and found nothing on his hook, Bert began to think perhaps it would be well to change the bait.

He opened his other tin box to get one of the grasshoppers, but no sooner was the lid raised than, with one accord, every grasshopper in the container leaped out and sailed away.

“Well—say—that wasn’t very polite!” laughed Bert. “Still, I can’t blame you!” he went on. “I guess it isn’t much fun to be stuck on a hook and swallowed by a fish. I’ll catch my grasshoppers right here, one at a time, as I need them,” he said.

He had noticed that in the field just back of the place he had picked out for fishing, many grasshoppers were jumping from weed to weed. Bert laid aside his pole, having noted that the worm had been nearly nibbled off the hook now by small fish, too little to land, and, going back, he caught a grasshopper in his hand.