trout with worms!"

"I don't see anything to laugh at," Tompkins grumbled. "Here we
waste a whole half holiday, and nothing to show for it, and have
got six or seven miles at least to tramp back to school."

"Well, we have had a nice walk," Ned said, "even if we are caught
in the rain. However, we may as well put up our rods and start. I
vote we try to make a straight cut home; it must be ever so much
shorter to go in a straight line than to follow all the windings
of this stream."

They had long since left the low lands, where trees and bushes
bordered the stream, and were in a lonely valley where the hills
came down close to the little stream, which sparkled among the
boulders at their feet. The slopes were covered with a crop of short
wiry grass through which the gray stone projected here and there.
Tiny rills of water made their way down the hillside to swell the
stream, and the tinge of brown which showed up wherever these found
a level sufficient to form a pool told that they had their source
in the bogs on the moorland above. Tompkins looked round him rather
disconcertedly.

"I don't know," he said. "It's a beastly long way to walk round;
but suppose we got lost in trying to make our way across the hills."

"Well, just as you like," Ned said, "I am game to walk back the
way we came or to try and make a straight cut, only mind don't you
turn round and blame me afterward. You take your choice; whichever
you vote for I am ready to do."