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The water is so transparent that the bottom can easily be discerned at the depth of twenty-five or thirty feet. Paddling over it, you may see, many feet beneath the surface, the schools of perch and shiners, perhaps only an inch long, yet the former easily distinguished by their transverse bars, and you think that they must be ascetic fish that find a subsistence there.
Yet for pickerel fishing through the ice the shiner is the king of bait and fortunate indeed are those fishermen who can obtain enough shiners to afford to use them lavishly. Properly hooked, just under the after back fin, they survive fairly well and their silver wrigglings are hard for a pickerel to resist.
There is a little promontory jutting into the lake, and sloping down to a sandy beach, on which the waters idly lapse, and shoals of red-fins and shiners come to greet the stranger; the forest is untouched by the axe; the tender green sweeps the water's edge; ranks of slender firs are marshaled by the shore; clumps of white-birch stems shine in satin purity among the evergreens; the boles of giant spruces, maples, and oaks, lifting high their crowns of foliage, stretch away in endless galleries and arcades; through the shifting leaves the sunshine falls upon the brown earth; overhead are fragments of blue sky; under the boughs and in chance openings appear the bluer lake and the outline of the gracious mountains.
She were an' old lady in a pair-'oss phaeton wi' plenty o' sparklers an' nice white hair: a rosy old creetur, comfortably plump and round 'specially in front. 'O Mr. 'ighwayman! says she, weepin' doleful as she tipped me 'er purse an' the shiners, ''ow could ye do it? 'Ma'm, I says, wipin' my eyes wi' my pistol and 'ma'm, I don't know but do it I must! An' I rode away quite down-'earted."
It is a hard lot to be cooped up in the city, vegitating, as it were, in the shade, where there is no grass for their little feet to press, no fences to climb, or fields to ramble over, or brooks to wade, or running water on which to float chips, and wherein to watch the little chubs and shiners dancing and playing about, or fresh pure air to breathe, or birds to listen to.
"Did you ketch anything for dinner when you was out this mornin'?" asked his wife. "No, I fished an' fished, till I was about ready to drop, an' I did git a few shiners, but land, they wa'n't as big as the worms I was ketchin' 'em with, so I pitched 'em back in the water an' quit." During the progress of these remarks Mr.
"If he does that," said le Biffon, "though I don't believe he is really God, he must certainly have smoked a pipe with old Scratch, as they say." "Didn't you hear him say, 'Old Scratch has cut me'?" said Fil-de-Soie. "Oh!" cried la Pouraille, "if only he would save my nut, what a time I would have with my whack of the shiners and the yellow boys I have stowed."
"Toney told him how he had been paid off and had pretty well emptied his pockets of shiners, and was thinking that before long he must join another craft. "`That's just what I was a thinking of too, so just step in here, mate, and we'll have a talk about the matter over a glass or two, and he pointed to the door of a public-house which stood temptingly open to entice passers-by.
I trust he does not read this, unless he will improve by it thinking to live by some derivative old-country mode in this primitive new country to catch perch with shiners. It is good bait sometimes, I allow.
"You big thief, you don't think I am after laving it to your itching fingers no, no, Pompey, even if the gentleman himself hadn't taken it out, he's been too long at sea not to guess pretty shrewdly that the shiners would vanish if the purse found its way forrard," said Dan. "You'll not be after calling me a big thief, Dan?" exclaimed Pompey, getting angry at this insinuation against his honesty.
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