“I’ll go,” said the friend the next moment: “I’m taller and stronger. I should rather like a towzle, but it won’t be easy. I can’t try it from above, or I shall come with a bang on the stone: but there are the stepping-stones just below. I can get out there if I can see them through the flood, and then I sha’n’t have above twenty yards to swim.” While he said this he was pulling off his clothes, and then he leapt exuberantly down the bank to the water. Suddenly he stopped. “How am I to bring him back?” he shouted. The angler was puzzled. To swim in a current like that with a bird in your hand was impossible without crushing it; and a naked man has no pockets. But necessity is the mother of invention. Quick as thought he whipped a casting-line off his hat, taking two flies off it and sticking them into his coat: this he wound round his friend’s wrist, and making the end fast, told him to tie it round the bird’s leg if he reached him. Carefully into the water his companion descended, feeling with his hand for the first stepping-stone; then balancing himself between this and the rushing water, he went on to the second. It was teasing work, but he managed the third, the fourth, the fifth, and then it was high time to swim, for the water was up to his middle and higher, and swayed him to and fro in a way that made the angler watch him eagerly. Then came a splash and a plunge, and his head was seen working up against the current, zigzagging to diminish the force of it. Twenty yards is a long way in such a stream, but if he could once get under the lee of that great boulder he would do. And in something like five minutes he was under the stone, and then on it. A strange sight it was to see a naked human creature sitting cross-legged on a boulder in such a flood! But he has caught the truant, and now he is tying that handy gut line round his leg. And then, standing up on the boulder, he flings the bird shorewards, one end of the line being still fast round his wrist. The bird sank on the water, and the man plunged in; fighting with the current that was sweeping him down, he made for the shore, and reached it breathless far below the stepping-stones, where the angler pulled him out of the water as joyfully as he ever pulled a trout. Then they wound up the line, and sure enough there came ashore at the end of it, a draggled, exhausted, and almost lifeless Sandpiper. To be carried in a human pocket is not pleasant for a bird, but our young scapegrace was too far gone to trouble himself about it. At his birthplace he was taken out, and there the angler stayed with him, sending his companion home to change. It was getting dark fast, but the old birds were still flying wildly up and down the river, piping loudly in a forlorn hope of finding their young one ere night should wrap the river in darkness. The angler put him down near the water and waited at a little distance.