one is an actor-manager with a fine chin, may be suicidal for a gentleman in the City with a tendency to bronchitis. But though he nearly lose his life in the winter, with the spring and his first saunter down St. James's Street, he is amply repaid if one eye dilates, and he hastens with quickened pulse in the direction of his prototype's theatre, doing his best to look as if he were late for rehearsal.
Such is the chevin in a trout stream.
I say nothing about him in his own place. Where dace and roach excite the emulous pole-fisher, where barbel growt after macaroni-and-cheese at dawn, where perch pull gay floats down among the water lilies, there the chevin is all very well. Fair play to him he is no easy fish to catch, though why anyone should wish to catch him I cannot conceive. His play is contemptible, for his heart is dead within him from the strike, and he is only fit for pike to eat, though they do not think so.
But in trout water he is out of his class, and, like every other thing which gets really above its proper sphere, he is miserable unless he can impose himself on the world as one who is there of right. Should he do this he is happier than he could ever be among fishes of his own or slightly better kidney. In water where chevins abound and trout are rarities no one would mistake the logger-headed creature for anything but himself.
