you'll fall in.
Here is the brook."

It made noise enough to be heard a long way off, but I thought that was
something else--some kobolds or other abnormal beings, probably, working
at their forges underground. The brook itself was well enough, but it
did not seem to belong there; you could not see it till you were on the
edge of it. I have fished a good many streams, and tramped through all
sorts of woods, but I never saw such a place as that before, and I never
want to again. We had left our rods at home; high-toned anglers who
carry fancy tackle through such regions leave it along the painful way
in small pieces. So we carried merely our baskets--which were
encumbrance enough--and what we had in our pockets. You can cut a pole
anywhere, and it does not want to be a long one either: take your
fly-book if you like, but worms are as good or better. There was no use
of wading: you would be more likely to scare the fish so than by staying
on the bank, where they could never see you; the difficulty was to see
far enough to throw in five feet of line. It was a superior brook--all
but the getting to it, and, as I afterwards found, away from it. If it
could be removed from its loathsome surroundings and put down in a
decent country, I would go there every year. I was going to say that
some of the cascades were forty feet high, till I remembered that trout
cannot climb as far as that.

"Don't lose your balance," said Jim; "these fish are fierce." They were,
in the wilder parts. They would bite like mad, and then wriggle and
wrench themselves off the hook before you could get them up the bank. I
never saw or heard of such ferocity, except in the celebrated scaly
warrior which chased an equally famous fisherman all over an Adirondack
lake, jumped across his boat several times, and, if I remember rightly,
bit him on the nose. No such adventure fell to my lot on this occasion,
though I thought that some of them, when sufficiently near my face,
grinned at me as they parted company. Yet none of them were over half a
pound, and most of them much less. You can see that this healthful
pastime does not produce its usual demoralizing effect on me. When we
reached a flat piece of ground, the water would become quiet and the
manners of the fish more humane, so that they would come out like
chubs. I stood in one spot under a tree, and took twenty-nine in
succession. My sister, looking over these memoirs, suggests that they
probably _were