Page:Tom Brown's School Days (6th ed).djvu/228

 "Look here, old boy," cried East, holding up a miserable coarse fish or two and a small jack, "would you like to smell 'em and see which bank they lived under?"

"I'll give you a bit of advice, keeper," shouted Tom, who was sitting in his shirt paddling with his feet in the river; "you'd better go down there to Swift's, where the big boys are, they're beggars at setting lines, and 'll put you up to a wrinkle or two for catching the five-pounders." Tom was nearest to the keeper, and that officer, who was getting angry at the chaff, fixed his eyes on our hero, as if to take a note of him for future use. Tom returned his gaze with a steady stare, and then broke into a laugh, and struck into the middle of a favorite School-house song:

The chorus was taken up by the other boys with shouts of laughter, and the keeper turned away with a grunt, but evidently bent on mischief. The boys thought no more of the matter.

But now came on the May-fly season; the soft, hazy, summer weather lay sleepily along the rich meadows by Avon side, and the green and gray flies flickered with their graceful, lazy, up-and-down flight over the reeds and the water and the meadows, in myriads upon myriads. The May-flies must surely be the lotus-eaters of the ephemeræ; the happiest, laziest, carelessest fly that dances and dreams out his few hours of sunshiny life by English rivers.

Every little, pitiful, coarse fish in the Avon was on the alert for the flies, and gorging his wretched carcass with hundreds daily,