Eels are hard to catch, and this one was seen to be nearly a yard in length when Paul managed to drag it ashore. Even out of water an eel is hard to conquer, for Nature has supplied it with a slimy skin that aids it to evade the strongest human grip. The boy sprang upon his prey and grasped it, but it wriggled from his hands, arms, and knees, and like an animated rubber tube bounded toward the stream. “Nail 'im, nail 'im!” cried out Ralph Rundel, excitedly, quickening his stride down the path. “Put sand on yore hands! Lemme show you--thar now, you got 'im--hold 'im till I--” But the snakelike thing, held for a moment in Paul's eager arms, was away again. The boy and the man bumped against each other as they sprang after it, and Ralph was fortunate enough to put the heel of his shoe on it's head and grind it into the earth. The dying thing coiled its lithe body round the man's ankle like a boa, and then gradually relaxed. Now, fully alive to the sport, Paul gave all his attention to rebaiting his hook. “This one raised such a racket he has scared all the rest off,” he muttered, his eyes on his line. “They'll come back purty soon,” Ralph said, consolingly. He sat down on the sand and began to fill his pipe. His excitement over the eel's capture had lived only a moment. There was a fixed stare in his eyes, a dreamy, contemplative note of weariness in his voice, which was that of a man who had outgrown all earthly interests. “How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord!” It was the mellow, sonorous voice of Jeff Warren singing at his home across the fields. “Humph! He gits a heap o' fun out of that, fust an' last,” Ralph remarked, sardonically, and he shrugged his frail shoulders. “It ain't so much the singin' he loves--if I'm any judge--as what it fetches to his net, as the sayin' is. He is a born lady's man. Jeff knows exactly when an' how to say the things that tickle a woman's fancy. I think--I think yore ma loves to hear 'im talk mighty nigh as well as she loves to hear 'im sing. I don't know”--a slight pause--“I say I don't know, but I _think_ so.” Paul thought he had a bite, and he raised his hook to see if the bait was intact. Ralph sighed audibly. He embraced his thin knees with his arms, and held the unlighted pipe in his hands. The hook was back in the water; the boy's face was half averted.