gently to the bottom.

Then, paying out the cable, we drifted to the edge of the shoal without
the least disturbance, and there brought up. Orion had his bait
ready--he threw his line right to windward, so that the float might drag
the worm naturally with the wind and slight current towards the shoal.

The tiny blue buoy dances up and down on the miniature waves; beyond it
a dazzling path of gold stretches away to the distant osier-islands--a
path down which we came without seeing it till we looked back. The
wavelets strike with a faint 'sock-sock' against the bluff overhanging
bow, and then roll on to the lee-shore close at hand.

It rises steep; then a broad green ledge; and after that, still steeper,
the face of a long-deserted sand-pit, where high up a rabbit sits at the
mouth of his hole, within range, but certain to escape even if hit, and
therefore safe. On the turf below is a round black spot, still showing,
though a twelvemonth has gone by since we landed with half a dozen
perch, lit a fire and cooked the fishes. For Molly never could 'a-bear'
perch, because of the hardness of the scales, saying she would as soon
'scrape a vlint;' and they laughed to scorn our idea of skinning them as
you do moorhens, whose 'dowl' no fingers can pick.

So we lit a fire and blew it up, lying on the soft short grass in a
state of nature after a swim, there being none to see us but the
glorious sun. The skinned perch were sweeter than any I have tasted
since.

'Look!' whispers Orion, suddenly. The quill above the blue buoy nods as
it lifts over the wavelets--nods again, sinks a little, jerks up, and
then goes down out of sight. Orion feels the weight. 'Two pounds, if
he's an ounce!' he shouts: soon after a splendid perch is in the boat,
nearer three pounds perhaps than two. Flop! whop! how he leaps up and
down on the planks, soiled by the mud, dulling his broad back and barred
sides on the grit and sand.

Roaming about like this with the gun, now on the water in the punt, and
now on land, we gradually came to notice very closely the game we wished
to shoot. We saw, for instance, that the rabbit when feeding or moving
freely, unless quickened by alarm, has a peculiar way of dwelling upon
his path. It almost resembles creeping; for both fore feet stop while
the hinder come up--one hinder foot slightly behind the other, and
rather wide apart.

When a fall of snow presents a perfect impression of his passage, it
appears as if