CHRISTOPHER IN HIS SPORTING JACKET 



ther, mother, and sisters, and brothers, and cousins, 

 and all the neighbourhood, holding the fish aloft in 

 both hands, still fearful of its escape, and, like a genu- 

 ine child of corruption, his eyes brighten at the first 

 blush of cold blood on his small fumy fingers. He car- 

 ries about with him, up-stairs and down-stairs, his 

 prey upon a plate; he will not wash his hands before 

 dinner, for he exults in the silver scales adhering 

 to the thumb-nail that scooped the pin out of the 

 baggy 's maw — and at night, "cabin'd, cribb'd, con- 

 fined," he is overheard murmuring in his sleep — a 

 thief, a robber, and a murderer, in his yet infant 

 dreams ! 



From that hour Angling is no more a mere delight- 

 ful day-dream, haunted by the dim hopes of imagi- 

 nary minnows, but a reality — an art — a science — of 

 which the flaxen-headed schoolboy feels himself to be 

 master — a mystery in which he has been initiated; 

 and off he goes now, all alone, in the power of success- 

 ful passion, to the distant brook — brook a mile off — 

 with fields, and hedges, and single trees, and little 

 groves, and a huge forest of six acres between it and 

 the house in which he is boarded or was born! There 

 flows on the slender music of the shadowy shallows — 

 there pours the deeper din of the birch-tree'd water- 

 fall. The scared water-pyet flits away from stone to 

 stone, and dipping, disappears among the airy bub- 

 [5] 



