While he was speaking, his flies alit on the glassy ripple, like gnats in their love-dance; and then by a turn of the wrist, he played them just below the surface, and let them go gliding down the stickle, into the shelfy nook of shadow where the big trout hovered.  Under the surface, floating thus, with the check of ductile influence, the two flies spread their wings and quivered, like a centiplume moth in a spider’s web.  Still the old trout, calmly oaring, looked at them both suspiciously.  Why should the same flies come so often, and why should they have such crooked tails, and could he be sure that he did not spy the shadow of a human hat about twelve yards up the water?  Revolving these things, he might have lived to a venerable age but for that noble ambition to teach, which is fatal to even the wisest.  A young fish, an insolent whipper-snapper, jumped in his babyish way at the palmer, and missed it through over-eagerness.  “I’ll show you the way to catch a fly,” said the big trout to him:  “open your mouth like this, my son.”

With that he bolted the palmer, and threw up his tail, and turned to go home again.  Alas! his sweet home now shall know him no more.  For suddenly he was surprised by a most disagreeable sense of grittiness, and then a keen stab in the roof of his month.  He jumped, in his wrath, a foot out of the water, and then heavily plunged to the depths of his hole.

“You’ve got it, my friend,” cried Hilary, in a tingle of fine emotions; “I hope the sailor’s knots are tied with professional skill and care.  You are a big one, and a clever one too.  It is much if I ever land you.  No net, or gaff, or anything.  I only hope that there are no stakes here.  Ah, there you go!  Now comes the tug.”

Away went the big trout down the stream, at a pace very hard to exaggerate, and after him rushed Hilary, knowing that his line was rather short, and that if it ran out, all was over.  Keeping his eyes on the water only, and the headlong speed of the fugitive, headlong over a stake he fell, and took a deep wound from another stake.  Scarcely feeling it, up he jumped, lifting his rod, which had fallen flat, and fearing to find no strain on it.  “Aha, he is not gone yet!” he cried, as the rod bowed like a springle-bow.

He was now a good hundred yards down the brook from the corner where the fight began.  Through his swiftness of foot, and good management, the fish had never been able to tighten the line beyond yield of endurance.  The bank had been free from bushes, or haply no skill could have saved him; but now they were come to a corner where a nut-bush quite overhung the stream.

“I am done for now,” said the fisherman; “the villain knows too well what he is about.  Here ends this adventure.”

Full though he was of despair, he jumped anyhow into the water, kept the point of his rod close down, reeled up a little as the fish felt weaker, and just cleared the drop of the hazel boughs.  The water flapped into the pockets of his coat, and he saw red streaks flow downward.  And then he plunged out to an open reach of shallow water and gravel slope.