er they had been
flung for a year or two into the Taunton pool.

But now, although my sister Annie came to keep me company, and was not
to be parted from me by the tricks of the Lynn stream, because I put her
on my back and carried her across, whenever she could not leap it, or
tuck up her things and take the stones; yet so it happened that neither
of us had been up the Bagworthy water. We knew that it brought a good
stream down, as full of fish as of pebbles; and we thought that it must
be very pretty to make a way where no way was, nor even a bullock came
down to drink. But whether we were afraid or not, I am sure I cannot
tell, because it is so long ago; but I think that had something to do
with it. For Bagworthy water ran out of Doone valley, a mile or so from
the mouth of it.

But when I was turned fourteen years old, and put into good
small-clothes, buckled at the knee, and strong blue worsted hosen,
knitted by my mother, it happened to me without choice, I may say, to
explore the Bagworthy water. And it came about in this wise.

My mother had long been ailing, and not well able to eat much; and there
is nothing that frightens us so much as for people to have no love of
their victuals. Now I chanced to remember that once at the time of
the holidays I had brought dear mother from Tiverton a jar of pickled
loaches, caught by myself in the Lowman river, and baked in the kitchen
oven, with vinegar, a few leaves of bay, and about a dozen pepper-corns.
And mother had said that in all her life she had never tasted anything
fit to be compared with them. Whether she said so good a thing out of
compliment to my skill in catching the fish and cooking them, or whether
she really meant it, is more than I can tell, though I quite believe
the latter, and so would most people who tasted them; at any rate, I
now resolved to get some loaches for her, and do them in the self-same
manner, just to make her eat a bit.

There are many people, even now, who have not come to the right
knowledge what a loach is, and where he lives, and how to catch and
pickle him. And I will not tell them all about it, because if I did,
very likely there would be no loaches left ten or twenty years after the
appearance of this book. A pickled minnow is very good if you catch him
in a stickle, with the scarlet fingers upon him; but I count him no more
than the ropes in beer compared with a loach done properly.

Being resolved to catch some loaches, wha