[Footnote 2:  A far more terrible clutch than this is handed down, to weaker ages, of the great John Ridd.—­ED. L.D.]

“I will not harm thee any more,” I cried, so far as I could for panting, the work being very furious:  “Carver Doone, thou art beaten; own it, and thank God for it; and go thy way, and repent thyself.”

It was all too late.  Even if he had yielded in his ravening frenzy—­for his beard was like a mad dog’s jowl—­even if he would have owned that for the first time in his life he had found his master, it was all too late.

The black bog had him by the feet; the sucking of the ground drew on him, like the thirsty lips of death.  In our fury we had heeded neither wet nor dry, nor thought of earth beneath us.  I myself might scarcely leap, with the last spring of o’erlabored legs, from the engulfing grave of slime.  He fell back, with his swarthy breast (from which my grip had rent all clothing), like a hummock of bog-oak, standing out the quagmire; and then he tossed his arms to heaven, and they were black to the elbow, and the glare of his eyes was ghastly.  I could only gaze and pant; for my strength was no more than an infant’s from the fury and the horror.  Scarcely could I turn away, while, joint by joint, he sank from sight.

LANDING THE TROUT

From ‘Alice Lorraine’

The trout knew nothing of all this.  They had not tasted a worm for a month, except when a sod of the bank fell in, through cracks of the sun, and the way cold water has of licking upward.  And even the flies had no flavor at all; when they fell on the water, they fell flat, and on the palate they tasted hot, even under the bushes.

Hilary followed a path through the meadows, with the calm bright sunset casting its shadow over the shorn grass, or up in the hedge-road, or on the brown banks where the drought had struck.  On his back he carried a fishing-basket, containing his bits of refreshment; and in his right hand a short springy rod, the absent sailor’s favorite.  After long council with Mabel, he had made up his mind to walk up-stream as far as the spot where two brooks met, and formed body enough for a fly flipped in very carefully to sail downward.  Here he began, and the creak of his reel and the swish of his rod were music to him, after the whirl of London life.

The brook was as bright as the best cut-glass, and the twinkles of its shifting facets only made it seem more clear.  It twisted about a little, here and there; and the brink was fringed now and then with something, a clump of loosestrife, a tuft of avens, or a bed of flowering water-cress, or any other of the many plants that wash and look into the water.  But the trout, the main object in view, were most objectionably too much in view.  They scudded up the brook at the shadow of a hair, or even the tremble of a blade of grass; and no pacific assurance could make them