She went over to where the jubilant fisherman was yet skipping about, and asked if she might play the fish a while.
"Law, Miss Elsie! he'd pull yo' overboa'd! Yo' couldn't hol' 'im no maw 'n nuffin. He's mighty strong; stronges' fish ever did see."
But Elsie teased till Jacob Isaac gave the rod into her hand, when she danced forward and back, chassé-ed, and executed other figures of a quadrille, till Puss Leek came up to play the fish. She wasn't so much like a katydid as Elsie, or so much like a wired jumping-jack as Jacob Isaac. She played the fish so awkwardly that John came up and took the rod from her hand. He had no sooner felt the pull at the line than he began to laugh and "pshaw! pshaw!" and said that all in that party were gumps and geese, except himself and Luke.
"You wouldn't except Luke," Elsie interrupted, "if he wasn't a big boy. You'd call him a gump and a goose, if he was a girl."
"If he was a girl, he would be a gump and a goose," said this saucy John. "This fish," he continued, "which you've been playing, is a piece of brush. Oh! how you did play it! This is the way that Jacob Isaac played it." John jumped and danced and hopped and strutted and plunged, till everybody was screaming with laughter. "And this is the way that Elsie played it." He got hold of his coat-skirts after the manner of an affected girl with her dress; then he hugged the rod to his bosom, and capered, flitted, pranced. Then, having reproduced Puss Leek's "playing," he said, grandly: "I shall now proceed to land this monster of the deep."
"He made a great show of getting ready, and then pulled, pulled, pulled, pulled,—when out and up there came, not the brush everybody was expecting, but a fine, beautiful fish.
You ought to have heard, then, the cheers of those surprised boys and girls! Jacob Isaac danced, turned somersaults, walked on his hands, and for one supreme half-second stood on his head.
"Looks like he was playing a whale or a sea-serpent," said Luke, between his bursts of laughter.
"You're all playing a fool that you've caught," said John, who had joined in the laugh against himself, "and you've a right to."
JOHN AND HIS VELOCIPEDE.