occasion to sit down to meditate upon the cause of his failure, and
tried to overcome it with many subtly reasoned changes of the fly--
which is a vain thing to do, but well adapted to make one forgetful
of the flight of time.

So I waited for him near an hour, and then ate my half of the
sandwiches and boiled eggs, smoked a solitary pipe, and fell into a
light sleep at the foot of the biggest birch tree, an old and trusty
friend of mine. It seemed like a very slight sound that roused me:
the snapping of a dry twig in the thicket, or a gentle splash in the
water, differing in some indefinable way from the steady murmur of
the stream; something it was, I knew not what, that made me aware of
some one coming down the brook. I raised myself quietly on one
elbow and looked up through the trees to the head of the pool. "Ned
will think that I have gone down long ago," I said to myself; "I
will just lie here and watch him fish through this pool, and see how
he manages to spend so much time about it."

But it was not Ned's rod that I saw poking out through the bushes at
the bend in the brook. It was such an affair as I had never seen
before upon a trout stream: a majestic weapon at least sixteen feet
long, made in two pieces, neatly spliced together in the middle, and
all painted a smooth, glistening, hopeful green. The line that hung
from the tip of it was also green, but of a paler, more transparent
colour, quite thick and stiff where it left the rod, but tapering
down towards the end, as if it were twisted of strands of horse-
hair, reduced in number, until, at the hook, there were but two
hairs. And the hook--there was no disguise about that--it was an
unabashed bait-hook, and well baited, too. Gently the line swayed
to and fro above the foaming water at the head of the pool; quietly