‘Well, I choose next: I choose that you should go away. I believe you are a sort of caddis-worm, whom nobody likes.’ ‘No, I’m not,’ said David. ‘I’m a boy.’ ‘Then you can’t be a Field-Marshal. That’s one to me.’ ‘Are we playing a game?’ he asked. ‘Is it a sort of happy families?’ ‘No. Two to me. Go away. I’ve got to be busy again.’ ‘What you mean by being busy,’ said David, ‘is that you want to eat something.’ The trout’s eye began to get glazed and vacant. ‘Worms!’ it said. ‘I believe that’s all you ever think about,’ said David. The stupid mouth began opening and shutting, and David began counting, rather relieved to find that he could do so again. The seventh time it opened the trout said: ‘No, it isn’t.’ ‘What else do you think about then?’ asked David. ‘Worms,’ said the trout. ‘But that’s the same thing,’ said David. This time the trout opened and shut its mouth so often without saying anything at all that David felt that there was no use in waiting any longer for it to speak. Even when it did speak, too, it was almost stupider than when it didn’t, and since he had come through the blue door he had met nobody so completely uninteresting. The groups round the fires looked just as hopeless, and he felt that he was only wasting his time. But he could not resist saying what he thought. ‘You’re much the stupidest thing I ever saw,’ he said. ‘I shall go away.’ ‘That’s what I always wanted you to do,’ said the trout. ‘And mind you don’t come back.’ David wondered whether fish might not be a little brighter at the top end of the lake where the stream flowed into it, and he waved his way up there. But even swimming fish-fashion had ceased to amuse him, for he did not want to do anything that fishes did. ‘If I learned to swim like them,’ he said to himself, ‘I should grow like them perhaps, and that would be awful. I shall get out of the water altogether when I come to the end of the roof. They never put it up over the stream.’ By and by the roof got thinner, and when he came into the stream, he found, as he had expected, that there was no roof at all. He put his head up very cautiously for fear he was not far enough away from the camp, and that he might be pursued again, but found that a mist had come up, quite covering the lawn, though bugles were still sounding there, and he felt safe in landing on the far side of the stream, underneath the shelter of the bridge. The moonlight felt very warm and comfortable after the water, and the moment he stepped on to land he was quite dry again, if he had ever really been wet at all. He had hardly taken his second foot out of the water when there was a great swirl in the stream behind him, and the head of a huge wicked pike snapped at his heel. ‘You little wretch,’ it said. ‘How dare you come into my lake? If I had only known about you a minute sooner, I’d have eaten you up.’ David bounded up the bank. He had never seen anything so ugly and cruel.