ppeared,
free from the broom now, and bearing a five-pronged fork and a small
flower-pot; for the fact that the boy was a brother angler superseded
the feeling of animosity against one who had so suddenly been raised
from a lowly position and placed over his head.

Peter winked one eye as he scraped away some of the dry straw, and then
turned over a quantity of the moist, rotten soil, displaying plenty of
the glistening red worms suitable for the capture of roach and perch.

"There you are," he said, after putting an ample supply in the
flower-pot, whose hole he had stopped with a piece of clay; "there's as
many as you'll want; and now, you go and fish down in the deep hole,
where the wall ends in the water, and I wish you luck."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

DEXTER MAKES A FRIEND.

"I like him," said Dexter to himself, as he hurried down the garden,
found the place, and for the next ten minutes he was busy fitting up his
tackle, watching a boy on the other side of the river the while, as he
sat in the meadow beneath a willow-tree fishing away, and every now and
then capturing a small gudgeon or roach.

The river was about thirty yards broad at this spot, and as Dexter
prepared his tackle and watched the boy opposite, the boy opposite
fished and furtively watched Dexter.

He was a dark, snub-nosed boy, shabbily-dressed, and instead of being
furnished with a bamboo rod and a new line with glistening float, he had
a rough home-made hazel affair in three pieces, spliced together, but
fairly elastic; his float was a common quill, and his line of so many
hairs pulled out of a horse's tail, and joined together with a
peculiarly fast knot.

Before Dexter was ready the shabby-looking boy on the other side had
caught two more silvery roach, and Dexter's heart beat fast as he at
last baited his hook and threw in the line as far as he could.

He was pretty successful in that effort, but his cork float and the shot
made a loud splash, while the boy opposite uttered a chuckle.

"He's laughing at me," said Dexter to himself; and he tried the
experiment of watching his float with one eye and the boy with the
other, but the plan did not succeed, and he found himself gazing from
one to the other, always hurriedly glancing back from the boy to the
float, under the impression that it bobbed.

He knew it all by heart, having many a time drunk in old Dimsted's
words, and he remembered that he could tell what fish was biting by the
wa