“I want a little Horace for eighteen-pence—the Cambridge one just published, to carry in my pocket—and a new hank of gut.”
“Which of the two is more important? Put that into Latin, and answer it.”
“Utrum pluris facio? Flaccum flocci. Viscera magni.” With this vast effort Pike turned as red as any trout spot.
“After that who could refuse you?” said my father. “You always tell the truth, my boy, in Latin or in English.”
Although it was a long walk, some fourteen miles to Wellington and back, I got permission to go with Pike; and as we crossed the bridge and saw the tree that overhung Crocker’s Hole, I begged him to show me that mighty fish.
“Not a bit of it,” he replied. “It would bring the blackguards. If the blackguards once find him out, it is all over with him.”
“The blackguards are all in factory now, and I am sure they cannot see us from the windows. They won’t be out till five o’clock.”
With the true liberality of young England, which abides even now as large and glorious as ever, we always called the free and enlightened operatives of the period by the courteous name above set down, and it must be acknowledged that some of them deserved it, although perhaps they poached with less of science than their sons. But the cowardly murder of fish by liming the water was already prevalent.
Yielding to my request and perhaps his own desire—manfully kept in check that morning—Pike very carefully approached that pool, commanding me to sit down while he reconnoitred from the meadow upon the right bank of the stream. And the place which had so sadly quenched the fire of the poor baker’s love filled my childish heart with dread and deep wonder at the cruelty of women. But as for John Pike, all he thought of was the fish and the best way to get at him.
Very likely that hole is “holed out” now, as the Yankees well express it, or at any rate changed out of knowledge. Even in my time a very heavy flood entirely altered its character; but to the eager eye of Pike it seemed pretty much as follows, and possibly it may have come to such a form again: