THE MICROBE 



escort began to look more truculent than ever, and 

 I trembled lest in some way I should become the 

 innocent victim of their unseemly mirth. My father 

 however succeeded in maintaining a straight face, 

 and with the utmost politeness informed them, so I 

 gathered, that I was an innocent British schoolboy and 

 that the instrument I was carrying was only a fishing- 

 rod. This was accepted with salutes all round, and 

 thus was I snatched from the jaws of the Bastille and 

 restored to the bosom of my prodigiously amused 

 family. How little my respected sire guessed when 

 he inspired the purchase of that rod, and how little 

 we recked when we selected it on the lawn of the 

 Exmoor rectory, that it would ever be in the hands 

 of French officials as a suspected instrument for the 

 murder of the French emperor ! Seriously, however, 

 I have not to this day the remotest notion what these 

 people were after. 



We had scarcely touched Swiss soil before my pis- 

 catorial ardour nearly landed the Oxonian and myself 

 in an awkward and ludicrous situation. My friend, 

 who is now, by the way, a most distinguished dean, 

 though he hailed from a trouting country, was not 

 much given over to the pursuit of fish. But we spent 

 a day and night at Constance, and adventuring the 

 shore of the lake at evening I hauled out a good-sized 

 fish, of the carp tribe, which acted so powerfully on 

 my companion's mind that we agreed to get up early 

 the next morning and repeat the experiment at the 

 same spot about a mile from the town. By a mere 

 accident I have my fishing journal for this year, and 

 the strange fish it recorded as an ' arle,' weight one 



35 



