e. He would sail up with dignity, open his great jaws,
and take in the tiny morsel.

Sometimes the moving shadows were large and of a slower motion, and
these, if they chanced to break through, would prove to be
bright-coloured moths or butterflies, or glittering beetles, or fat
black and yellow bumblebees, or lean black and yellow wasps. If he was
hungry, all these things were good for food, and his bony,
many-toothed mouth cared nothing for stings. Sometimes when he was not
at all hungry, but merely playful, he would rise with a rush at
anything breaking the sheen of his roof, slap it with his tail, then
seize it between his hard lips and carry it down with him, only to
drop it a moment later as a child might drop a toy. Once in awhile,
either in hunger or in sport, he would rise swiftly at the claws or
wing-tips of a dipping swallow; but he never managed to catch the
nimble bird. Had he, by any chance, succeeded, he would probably have
found the feathers no obstacle to his enjoyment of the novel fare.

At times it was not a shadow, but a splash, that would attract his
attention to the shining roof of his world. A grasshopper would fall
in, and kick grotesquely till he rose to end its troubles. Or a
misguided frog, pursued perhaps by some enemy on land, would dive in
and swim by with long, webbed toes. At this sight the master of the
pool would dart from his lair like a bolt from a catapult. Frogs were
much to his taste. And once in a long time even a wood-mouse, hard
pressed and panic-stricken, would leap in to swim across to the meadow
shore. The first time this occurred the trout had risen slowly, and
followed below the swimmer till assured that there was no peril
concealed in the tempting phenomenon. After that, however, he always
went at such prey with a ferocious rush, hurling himself half out of
water in his eagerness.

But it was not only to his translucent sky that the master of the
pool looked for his meat. A large part of it came down upon the
current of the brook. Bugs, grubs, and worms, of land and water, some
dead, others disabled or bewildered by their passage through the
falls, contributed to his feasting. Above all, there were the smaller
fish who were so reckless or uninformed as to try to pass through
Golden Pool. They might be chub, or suckers, or red-fin; they might
be--and more often were--kith and kin of his own. It was all the same
to the big trout, who knew as well as any gourmet that trout