it. The mill pool has only once in my experience of it been wholly devoid of rises. This was the occasion. By this time my hunger was enormous. I thought of that chicken. I thought of the four miserable portions into which I could divide it. I thought of its wretched little legs vanishing in three bites of those strong, ravenous jaws that I had bidden all the way from London to its consumption. I thought of our poor housekeeper reduced to buttered eggs. I thought of a great wheaten loaf there was in the larder. And of myself, I thought of myself. I would be host, I would be carver. Whoever was going to be fed it could not be I—unless I caught a trout within the next half-hour.
It was now that the fancy dress of angling suddenly fell away from it, and I knew it for the stark, grim, elemental business it is. I began to think of the fat fishes which inhabit the mill pool in quite unfamiliar terms. They were no longer the ministers of my pleasure. They were no longer there to afford me the opportunity of exhibiting my sportsmanship, my skill in overcoming drag, my capacity to cheat a cross wind, my ability to cock a fly, my cunning in persuading them among the weed beds. They presented themselves to my imagination as pounds of meat, sizzling morsels of pink flesh, builders up of the
