```Till, floating broad upon his breathless side, ```And to his fate abandoned, to the shore ```You gayly drag your unresisting prize._ `````--James Thomson, `````_The Seasons._ [Illustration: 0259] XVIII. THE BULLY OF THE UPPER OSWEGATCHIE [Illustration: 0259] F the sucker had gone twenty feet farther up the little brook on his foraging expedition this story would not have been written. However, by the time he had appropriated some ten thousand trout eggs, the hunger which had urged him into the mouth of the brook deserted him, and, as the water was too cold for his liking, he made his way back to the river where he could take a siesta in the pool that he had left that morning. Just above the spot where the sucker turned about was a bend in the stream, and, passing that, you came upon a reach of shallow water running over the most beautiful bed of gravel in that whole section. It was here that the Bully was born, in the afternoon of the very day when destruction in the form of a predatory sucker came so near to him. Not that he appeared much like a bully in those first hours of conscious existence. In fact he looked more like an animated sliver with a sack suspended from underneath. He moved slowly about the stream in company with a hundred or so other little fellows until the sack had disappeared, and then it was easy to see that he had the advantage of all his comrades in the matter of size at least. [Illustration: 0261] When they began feeding upon the tiny forms of life found in the creek, the Bully soon gained a reputation for pugnaciousness. He did not hesitate to crowd his best friend away from a larva, and, before he was an inch long, he had bitten the left pectoral fin from one of his comrades who had ventured to resist the Bully’s attempt to rob him of a luscious little snail that he had discovered. One day when the Bully was yet a fingerling he joined battle with a chub twice his size, and, although he lost a part of his tail in the fray, and all the spectators thought he was whipped before the conflict had fairly begun, the thought of giving up never occurred to him, and he fought until his foe turned tail and fled into the river, a quarter of a mile away.