"There, I've touched bottom. Now for him! Here he comes. I'll draw him ashore easy—that's it! Hurrah! biggest fish ever was caught in the Cocahutchie!"
That might or might not be so, but Jack Ogden had a three-pound trout, flopping angrily upon the grass at his feet.
"I know how to do it now," he almost shouted. "I can catch 'em! I won't let anybody else know how it's done, either."
He had learned something, no doubt, but he had not learned how to make a large fish out of a small one. All the rest of that afternoon he caught grasshoppers and cast them daintily into what seemed to be good places, but he did not have another occasion to tumble in. When at last he was tired out and decided to go home, he had a dozen more of trout, not one of them weighing over six ounces, with a pair of very good yellow perch, one very large perch, a sucker, and three bullheads, that bit when his bait happened to sink to the bottom without any lead to help it. Take it all in all, it was a great string of fish to be caught on a Saturday afternoon, when all that the Crofield sportsmen around the mill-pond could show was six bullheads, a dozen small perch, a lot of "pumpkin-seeds" not much larger than dollars, five small eels, and a very vicious snapping-turtle.
Jack stood for a moment looking down at the results of his experiment in fly-fishing. He felt, really, as if he could not more than half believe it.
"Fishing doesn't pay," he said. "It doesn't pay cash, any way. There isn't anything around Crofield that does pay. Well, it must be time for me to go home."
CHAPTER III.
I AM ONLY A GIRL.
Jack was dry enough, but anybody could see that he had had a ducking, when he marched down the main street. He was carrying his prizes in two strings, one in each hand, and he was looking and feeling taller than he ever felt before. It was just the right hour to meet people, and he had to answer curious questions from some women, and from twice as many men, and from three times as many boys, all the way from above the green, where he came out into the street, down to the front of the Washington Hotel.