THE BRUSHWOOD BOY
"'Fraid it won't be, mummy. All those men from town, and the girls particularly, have put every trout off his feed for weeks. There is n't one of 'em that cares for fishin’—really. Fancy stampin' and shoutin' on the bank, and tellin' every fish for half a mile exactly what you 're goin' to do, and then chuckin' a brute of a fly at him! By Jove, it would scare me if I was a trout!"
But things were not as bad as he had expected. The black gnat was on the water, and the water was strictly preserved. A three-quarter-pounder at the second cast set him for the campaign, and he worked down-stream, crouching behind the reed and meadow-sweet; creeping between a hornbeam hedge and a foot-wide strip of bank, where he could see the trout, but where they could not distinguish him from the background; lying almost on his stomach to switch the blue-upright side-wise through the checkered shadows of a gravelly ripple under overarching trees. But he had known every inch of the water since he was four feet high. The aged and astute between sunk roots, with the large and fat that lay in the frothy scum below some strong rush of water, sucking as lazily as carp, came to trouble in their turn, at the hand that imitated so delicately the flicker and wimple of an egg-dropping fly. Consequently, Georgie found himself five miles from home when he ought to have been dressing for dinner. The housekeeper had taken good care that her boy should not go empty, and before he changed to the white moth he sat down to excellent claret with sandwiches of potted egg and things that adoring women make and
[418]
