rotected stream, being leased to a rich fishing club; and the master
of the pool was therefore secure against the treacherous assaults of
net or dynamite. Many times each season fishermen would come and pit
their skill against his cunning; but never a fly could tempt him,
never a silvery, trolled minnow or whirling spoon deceive him to the
fatal rush. At some new lure he would rise lazily once in awhile,
revealing his bulk to the ambitious angler,--but never to take hold.
Contemptuously he would flout the cheat with his broad flukes, and go
down again with a grand swirl to his lair under the rock.

It was only to the outside world--to the dragon-fly, and the bird, and
the chattering red squirrel in the overhanging hemlock--that the deep
water under the bank looked black. To the trout in his lair, looking
upward toward the sunlight, the whole pool had a golden glow. His
favourite position was a narrow place between two stones, where he lay
with head up-stream and belly about two inches from the sandy bottom,
gently fanning the water with his party-coloured fins, and opening and
closing his rosy gill-fringes as he breathed. In length he was
something over twenty inches, with a thick, deep body tapering finely
to the powerful tail. Like all the trout of the Clearwater, he was
silver-bellied with a light pink flush, the yellow and brown markings
on his sides light in tone, and his spots of the most high, intense
vermilion. His great lower jaw was thrust forward in a way that gave a
kind of bulldog ferocity to his expression.

The sky of the big trout's world was the flat surface of Golden Pool.
From the unknown place beyond that sky there came to his eyes but
moving shadows, arrangements of light and dark. He could not see out
and through into the air unobstructedly, as one looks forth from a
window into the world. Most of these moving shadows he understood very
well. When broad and vague, they did not, as a rule, greatly interest
him; but when they got small, and sharply black, he knew they might at
any instant break through with a splash and become real, coloured
things, probably good to eat. A certain slim little shadow was always
of interest to him unless he was feeling gorged. Experience had taught
him that when it actually touched the shining surface above, and lay
there sprawling helplessly with wet wings, it would prove to be a May
fly, which he liked. Having no rivals to get ahead of him, there was
no need of hast