Clough would say, while the summer snipes flitted whistling up the
shallow before us, and the soft, south-eastern clouds slid lazily
across the sun, and the little trout snapped and dimpled at a tiny
partridge hackle, with a twist of orange silk, whose elegance for
shape and colour reconciled Claude's heart somewhat to my everlasting
whipping of the water. When as last:-
'You seem to have given up catching anything. You have not stirred a
fish in this last two pools, except that little saucy yellow shrimp,
who jumped over your fly, and gave a spiteful slap at it with his
tail.'
Too true; and what could be the cause? Had that impudent sand-piper
frightened all the fish on his way up? Had an otter paralysed them
with terror for the morning? Or had a stag been down to drink? We
saw the fresh slot of his broad claws, by the bye, in the mud a few
yards back.
'We must have seen the stag himself, if he had been here lately,'
said Claude.
'Mr. Landseer knows too well by this time that that is a non
sequitur.'
'"I am no more a non sequitur than you are," answered the Cornish
magistrate to the barrister.
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