296 Fish Stories 



The male dresses in jet-black when the breeding season 

 is on, sometimes with a further ornament of copper red, 

 or of scarlet. The sticklebacks build their nests in which 

 to hide their eggs, and over these the male stands guard, 

 defending them with courage which would be dauntless in 

 any animal more than two inches long. Very often he has 

 to repel the attacks of the female herself, who, being re- 

 lived of all responsibility for her offspring, is prone to turn 

 cannibal. Even the little dwellers of the brook have their 

 own troubles and adversities and perversities. 



Last of all comes the blob, or miller's thumb, who hides 

 in darkness and picks up all that there is left. He is scale- 

 less and slippery, large of head, plump of body and with 

 no end of appetite. He lurks under stones when the water 

 is cold. He is gray and greenish, like the bottom, in color. 

 He robs the buried fish nests of eggs, swallows the young 

 fishes, devours the dead ones and checks the undue increase 

 of all, not forgetting his own kind. When he has done his 

 work and the fall has come and gone, and the winter and 

 the spring return, the brook once more fills with fishes, and 

 there are the same kinds, with the same actions, the same 

 ways and the same numbers, and one might think from year 

 to year, as the sun is said to do, that these were the self- 

 same waters and the selfsame fishes mating over and over 

 again and feeding on the selfsame food. 



But this is not so. The old stage remains, or seems to 

 remain, but every year come new actors, and the lines which 

 they repeat were "written for them centuries before they 

 were born." But each generation which passes changes 

 their lives just a little, just as the brook and the meadow 

 itself are changing. 



