60 THE PIKE 



beginning of a spell truthfully admitted to be ' some- 

 thing like a winter ; ' the fingers rapidly became 

 numbed, and even the toes in the straw strewing the 

 bottom boards of the boat literally ached with the cold. 

 The young man with the oars, although used to 

 open-air toil, was becoming frozen, and seemed to be 

 shrinking up within himself in proportion as the tip 

 of his nose grew bluer and bluer. I must nevertheless 

 confess that shortly after noon, when the sun was shin- 

 ing clear without strength, I was astonished to notice a 

 formation of ice underneath each ring of the pike rod, 

 and the line as it came through my hands felt more 

 like wire than it had ever done before. It became 

 distinctly hard during the almost imperceptible interval 

 between the seconds when it left the water and was 

 worked in to be coiled at my feet. In less than a 

 quarter of an hour it was necessary to stop proceedings, 

 though the rings were, as all pike-rod rings should be, 

 of the largest, little less than half an inch in diameter ; 

 yet they were now solidly blocked with white ice, and 

 I had to stop for the simple reason that the jammed 

 line declined any longer the contest with icicles. 

 As may be supposed, the fingers had now become so 

 cold that they had lost all feeling except an abiding 

 hint of pain, which induced a maximum of clumsiness 

 in dealing with obstructions. The ice in the five rings 



