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When you meet a youngster, ostentatiously setting forth for the Gully Road, with bait-box and pole, you need not ask where he is going; though if you have any human sympathy in the pride of life, you will not deny him his answer: "Down to have a try for the old trout!" The pool has been still for many years.
Like all boys of his age, our hero was supplied with a variety of articles, which, however serviceable they may be to a youngster of sixteen, no one else could possibly find use for, and the Ranchero's investigations brought to light a fish-line, bait-box, a rooster's spur, of which Frank intended to make a charger for his rifle, a piece of buckskin, half a dozen bullets, a brass cannon, a pocket comb, a quill pop-gun, a small compass, a silver ring, a match-box, a jack-knife, and a piece of lead.
Fishing in such a jolly little stream, surrounded by this mountain scenery, and with the privileges of the beautiful situation all to myself, would have been a joy to me if I had had never a bite. But no such ill-luck befell me. Peter had given me the can of grasshoppers after putting half of them into his own bait-box, and these I used with much success.
Or at another table you would listen to a group of English officers talking in wonder of the Germans' wasteful advance in solid formation. "They were piled so high," one of them relates, "that I stopped firing. They looked like gray worms squirming about in a bait-box. I can shoot men coming at me on their feet, but not a mess of arms and legs."
Look about you, and see your squirming neighbors, writhing and twisting like so many angleworms in a fisher's bait-box, or the wriggling animalculae seen in the vinegar drop held to the sun. How they look, how they feel, how base it makes them all!" "Every human being is entitled to the means of life, as the trout is to his brook or the lark to the blue sky.
If he'd stand on his head on the cashier's desk, the cashier would laugh first, and then, to get rid of him, would suggest that he go into the dining-room and play with the headwaiter; and when he upset the contents of his bait-box in Mrs. Harkaway's lap, she interfered when I scolded him, and said she liked it. What can you do when people talk that way?"
Such questions, like those pertaining to the boots or coat which one should wear, the style of bait-box one should carry, or the brand of tobacco best suited for smoking in the wind, are topics for unending discussion among the serious minded around the camp-fire. Much edification is in them, and yet they are but prudential maxims after all.
"Get him to upset his bait-box in her lap again," said Thaddeus. "I think if he had been encouraged to do that as a regular thing, every morning for a week, she'd have changed her tune." "Well, it all goes to prove one thing," said Mrs. Perkins, "and that is, Teddy needs more care than we can give him personally. We are too lenient.
The captain now winked in his turn, looked around him to make sure no one was listening, and laying a finger on his nose, he answered, in a much lower key than was usual for him "You can keep a secret, I know, commodore. Now what I have to say is not to be told to Mrs. Abbott, in order that it may be repeated and multiplied, but is to be kept as snug as your bait, in the bait-box."
Ruth thoughtlessly slipped after him and murmured over his shoulder: "Friend of yours?" Gethryn's fists unclenched and came out of his pockets and he and Ruth went away together, laughing under the trees. Mr Blumenthal stood where Rex had left him, holding out the bait-box and gazing after them. Then he turned and looked at the colonel and his wife.
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