"Oh, not for six weeks yet."
Jack looked at Bessie. "Come on, Bessie! I'll give you a game of tennis. Expect you'll beat me easily now. Haven't had a game since last summer."
"Don't they play in Scotland?"
"Oh, yes, they play, but I don't."
So they played, and it was very close, but Bessie did not win.
"I believe you've been practising," she said.
"No, I haven't," he answered. "Come on down to the brook and see if that old trout is still there."
"That old trout," was an ancient retainer of the Carstairs family, weighing some two to two and a half pounds. Six successive sons had tried to catch him: bright red worms, "dopping" blue bottles, artificial flies, gentles and green caterpillars had been tried in vain; the veteran shook his head and slowly winked the other eye as he lazily flapped his tail in the gentle current, regarding the tempting baits and eager faces peering over the blackberry bushes with easy unconcern. Twice they had waded through the shallows, three abreast, with butterfly nets, after frightening him from his deep hole, but without success: once, indeed, with the aid of wire netting, was the speckled warrior landed, high and dry; but after performing a joyous war-dance, hand in hand, round the panting, kicking champion, the means were voted underhand and mean—not sporting—so by unanimous consent he was consigned to the deep again, never afterwards, by fair means or foul, to be lured thence. In later days he reigned supreme, monarch of all he surveyed, for many yards on either side of the willow tree, his seat. It was considered the correct thing, when on holidays, to feed him with worms and gentles and other tit-bits.
So, rackets in hands, they strolled down to the brook and peeped cautiously over the top of a blackberry bush, down into a deep hole under the roots of an overhanging willow tree; silently they pressed forward, for the bush had grown and obscured the view more than it used to. Suddenly there was a slip, a little scream, a sound of tearing dress material, a splash, and Bessie was in the stream.
Jack knew that Bessie could not swim, one of the few athletic accomplishments she had not acquired. The water was six or seven feet deep for two or three hundred yards on either side of the hole, which was nine or ten feet deep, the banks were very steep.