142 A MOORLAND TARN 



blew in straight and hard, driving the inky waves upon 

 cavernous resounding banks of peat, crested with rank 

 heather, while the softness of the bottom put wading 

 out of the question. Fishing, in fact, was out of the 

 question ; we had endured our toil for nothing ; there 

 was nothing for it but to make our way back whence 

 we had come. 



We were gazing dejectedly at the dreary little hole, 

 when suddenly, hopelessly out of reach, there came a 

 spanking rise, followed shortly by another. There were 

 good fish, then, in this unpromising abode, though they 

 might as well have been in Kamschatka for all the use 

 they were to us. Thereupon befell a strange thing. It 

 was the Devil himself that put a simultaneous thought 

 in both our minds. Our eyes met and sank guiltily. 



' Eh ? ' gasped my friend, with a wretched attempt at 

 a smile. 



I nodded, with a still more abortive manifestation of 

 mirth. 



We looked behind us and all around. There was no 

 sign of human presence or habitation, not even a bird 

 to carry the tale of the dreadful deed that was in our 

 minds. Without a word spoken, we sat down on the 

 heather and unbuckled our flybooks right away. Five 

 strong casting lines we chose and knotted together, end 

 to end ; twenty good flies we appended to them at due 

 intervals; and then, with tremulous fingers, attached 

 the ends of the fifteen yards of gut to the ends of our 

 two reel lines, I stole round the margin to the farther 

 shore, amid hummocks of bog-myrtle and peat, the 



