IRISH LOACH-TROLLING. 13 
his suspicions, Assuming, therefore, an air of in- 
difference, he diplomatically approached the subject 
of his curiosity by remarking: “Well, Tom, if it 
isn’t bad manners, or making too free, might one ask 
what you've got in the kettle? A horn of Cruise’s 
‘ Castle Billingham,’ ora ‘ cropper’ of Jim Flanigan’s 
‘double-shot’ that never saw the face of a gauger, 
wouldn’t be a bad beginning of the day’s work.” 
Quite prepared for the question, and alive to its sig- 
nificance, Tom coolly replied : “Snipes, Paddy !” and, 
suiting the action to the word, applied his fore-finger 
to the point of that prominence in the “human face 
divine,” usually appealed to in responses of this kind. 
Paddy was fairly “sold,” “bothered out and out,” with- 
out achanceof making anotherattack on the suspected 
“kettle.” They accordingly parted good-humouredly 
in the flash of the repartee—Tom to his boat, which 
lay higher up the lake, Pat to tend his potato-beds 
on the hill. The latter, however, did not wholly 
relinquish the chase, and muttered as he went along: 
“ A kettle of snipes, indeed! Did anyone ever hear 
of snipes in such a lardther afore? The ould thief- 
catcher! I’ll be even with him yet!” and so passed on 
to his work. Looking down occasionally from the hill- 
side, which commanded a viewof the whole lake, he saw 
from the track and pace of Tom’s boat that he must be 
trolling for something. But then nobody trolled, at 
the time, for trout; pike were fortunately few in the 
