46 The Autocrat of the Eddy. 



not seize him from below, and he certainly 

 could not be caught fairly. " How about 

 the water snakes ? " asks another ; and 

 the reply, " He is too large for them to 

 fight," comes back in a moment. " Has a 

 snapping-turtle caught him ? " is asked ; 

 but a dozen replies at once say that no 

 snapping-turtle has passed along the 

 stream for a year and a half. "Has a 

 fisherman got him ? " asks one ; and such 

 a chuckling and laughing comes from all 

 sides that one is quickly convinced that 

 the fisherman is the least dangerous of 

 the four enemies of the trout. 



The fact of the matter is that in the 

 fall the old trout's fancy lightly turns to 

 thoughts of love, and in this connection I 

 might as well say that of late years he has 

 been guilty of bigamy. Formerly he 

 would .quietly leave the eddy on a late 

 September day, and go down stream to a 

 shallow nook where a lively spring made 

 the sand boil up at the bottom in four or 

 five puffs at a time ; where the caddis 

 worms built their armor of sticks and 

 mica scales, and where alders growing 



