CHAPTER IX.
THE SQUATTER TURNS UP AGAIN.
ONE fishing excursion is much like another, and any boy who has handled a nicely-balanced bait-rod when the black bass, perch, and yellow pike were hungry and full of fight, as they were on the morning of which we write, will have a clearer idea of the sport Tom Bigden and the rest enjoyed there on the pond than we could possibly give him. We did not follow them through the rapids to tell how they played their fish and how many they caught, and so we shall have but little to say about it. Joe Wayring affirmed that the twenty minutes' fight he had with a nine pound pike, which began in less than half a second after he dropped his hook into the water, gave him solid comfort and enjoyment for a week afterward; but whether or not he found any
