‘You beastly fish,’ he said. ‘If I had teeth like you, I should go to the dentist. I’m not frightened of you.’ He was terrified really, but when you are frightened, it is always comforting to say you’re not. ‘Yes, you are,’ said the pike, snapping his jaws, and shouldering his way up through the shallow water. ‘You daren’t come down into the stream again.’ ‘I don’t want to come into your muddy stream,’ said David. ‘I should if I wanted to. And for that matter you daren’t come up here.’ ‘Yes, I dare,’ said the pike, pushing farther up, till half his horrid body was out of the stream. ‘And I’m coming too.’ David really didn’t feel sure that he wasn’t, for since he had got through the blue door, he had found that animals and soldiers and flowers could do all sorts of things that you wouldn’t expect they were able to. So he made himself very dignified, and walked away from the stream, trying very hard not to hurry till he was out of sight of the pike. ‘Coward, coward,’ yelled the pike. ‘You wait till I catch you.’ David felt pretty safe now, for he knew that he must be able to run on land as fast as a pike, but he continued to walk away, along by the hedge, till he had put a considerable distance between himself and the stream. It was not quite proper for a bird-boy and a Field-Marshal to run away from a fish, but this was such an awful fish. . . . There were two signboards, he knew, in this field, one down by the river about fishing, and the other where there was a path across it, on which was the notice, ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted with the utmost rigour of the law.’ He did not mind about that notice since both the field and the notice belonged to his father, but when he came to the second signboard and looked up at it, he felt suddenly frozen with terror, and his teeth chattered like Mr. Funk the bather. For instead of the ordinary notice this was written up in large capitals: TRESPASSERS WILL BE MARRIED WITH THE UTMOST RIGOUR OF THE LAW ‘Oh, what am I to do?’ thought poor David. ‘There’s a girl coming into it after all. I know she’ll spoil everything.’ He began running back towards the stream again, for he felt he would rather fight the pike than be married, but then he thought of those savage jaws and those dreadful teeth, and his legs simply would not take him any nearer the stream. They said ‘No!’ just as if they had spoken aloud. Between his mind that said that he had better face any danger sooner than be married, and his legs that said that they would go anywhere except towards the pike, he completely lost his head, and began running in circles round the field, saying to himself in a most determined voice: ‘I won’t be married, I won’t be eaten by the pike, I won’t be married to a pike, I won’t be eaten by anybody.’ [Illustration: Noah pursues David]