to care whether he was admired. We can pay nature no higher
compliment.

But when they came to the Slugs! The Slugs of Kenny is a wild crevice
through which the Drumly cuts its way, black and treacherous, into a
lovely glade where it gambols for the rest of its short life; you
would not believe, to see it laughing, that it had so lately escaped
from prison. To the Slugs they made their way--not to fish, for any
trout that are there are thinking for ever of the way out and of
nothing else, but to eat their luncheon, and they ate it sitting on
the mossy stones their persons had long ago helped to smooth, and
looking at a roan-branch, which now, as then, was trailing in the
water.

There were no fish to catch, but there was a boy trying to catch them.
He was on the opposite bank; had crawled down it, only other boys can
tell how, a barefooted urchin of ten or twelve, with an enormous
bagful of worms hanging from his jacket button. To put a new worm on
the hook without coming to destruction, he first twisted his legs
about a young birch, and put his arms round it. He was after a big
one, he informed Corp, though he might as well have been fishing in a
treatise on the art of angling.

Corp exchanged pleasantries with him; told him that Tommy was Captain
Ure, and that he was his faithful servant Alexander Bett, both of
Edinburgh. Since the birth of his child, Corp had become something of
a humourist. Tommy was not listening. As he lolled in the sun he was
turning, without his knowledge, into one of the other Tommies. Let us
watch the process.