him.

When they come to the five-rail fence where the brook runs out of the
field, the question is, Over or under? The lowlier method seems safer
for the little brother, as well as less conspicuous for persons who
desire to avoid publicity until their enterprise has achieved success.
So they crawl beneath a bend in the lowest rail,--only tearing one tiny
three-cornered hole in a jacket, and making some juicy green stains on
the white stockings,--and emerge with suppressed excitement in the field
of the cloth of buttercups and daisies.

What an afternoon--how endless and yet how swift! What perilous efforts
to leap across the foaming stream at its narrowest points; what escapes
from quagmires and possible quicksands; what stealthy creeping through
the grass to the edge of a likely pool, and cautious dropping of the
line into an unseen depth, and patient waiting for a bite, until the
restless little brother, prowling about below, discovers that the hook
is not in the water at all, but lying on top of a dry stone,--thereby
proving that patience is not the only virtue--or, at least, that it does
a better business when it has a small vice of impatience in partnership
with it!

How tired the adventurers grow as the day wears away; and as yet they
have taken nothing! But their strength and courage return as if by
magic when there comes a surprising twitch at the line in a shallow,
unpromising rapid, and with a jerk of the pole a small, wiggling fish is
whirled through the air and landed thirty feet back in the meadow.

"For pity's sake, don't lose him! There he is among the roots of the
blue flag."