"Humph! are you intimately acquainted with this stream, sir?"
"No," answered Leonard. "I never saw it before."
Angler (solemnly).—"Then, young man, take my advice, and do not give way to its fascinations. Sir, I am a martyr to this stream; it has been the Dalilah of my existence."
Leonard (interested, the last sentence seemed to him poetical).—"The Dalilah! Sir—the Dalilah!"
Angler.—"The Dalilah. Young man, listen, and be warned by example. When I was about
your age, I first came to this stream to fish. Sir, on that fatal day, about 3, p.m., I hooked up a fish—such a big one, it must have weighed a pound and a half. Sir, it was that length;" and the angler put finger to wrist. "And just when I had got it nearly ashore, by the very place where you are sitting, on that shelving bank, young man, the line broke, and the perch twisted himself among those roots, and—caco-dæmon that he was—ran off, hook and all. Well, that fish haunted me; never before had I seen such a fish. Minnows I had caught in the Thames and elsewhere, also gudgeons, and occasionally a dace. But a fish like that—a PERCH—all his fins up like the sails of a man-of-war—a monster perch—a whale of a perch!—No, never till then had I known what leviathans lie hid within the deeps. I could not sleep till I had returned; and again, sir—I caught that perch. And this time I pulled him fairly out of the water. He escaped; and how did he escape? Sir, he left his eye behind him on the hook. Years, long years, have passed since then; but never shall I forget the agony of that moment."
Leonard.—"To the perch, sir?"
Angler.—"Perch! agony to him! He enjoyed it:—agony to me. I gazed on that eye, and the eye looked as sly and as wicked as if it was laughing in my face. Well, sir, I had heard that there is no better bait for a perch than a perch's eye. I adjusted that eye on the hook, and dropped in the line gently. The water was unusually clear; in two minutes I saw that perch return. He approached the hook; he recognized his eye—frisked his tail—made a plunge—and, as I live, carried off the eye, safe and sound; and I saw him digesting it by the side of that water lily. The mocking fiend! Seven times since that day, in the course of a varied and eventful life, have I caught that perch, and seven times has that perch escaped."
Leonard (astonished):—"It can't be the same perch; perches are very tender fish—a hook inside of it, and an eye hooked out of it—no perch could withstand such havoc in its constitution."
Angler (with an appearance of awe).—"It does seem supernatural. But it is that perch; for harkye, sir, there is only one perch in the whole brook! All the years I have fished here, I have never caught another perch here; and this solitary inmate of the watery element I know by sight better than I know my own lost father. For each time that I have raised it out of the water, its profile has been turned to me, and I have seen, with a shudder, that it has had only—One Eye! It is a most mysterious and a most diabolical phenomenon, that perch! It has been the ruin of my prospects in life. I was offered a situation in Jamaica; I could not go, with that perch left here in triumph. I might afterward have had an appointment in India, but I could not put the ocean between myself and that perch: thus have I frittered away my existence in the fatal metropolis of my native land. And once a-week, from February to December,