"Yes, I am; John's made me hungry." "Me, too," said Jacob Isaac. "Of course, you're hungry," said John. "Come along! Hold your two hands." "Let's go look for sweet-Williams and blue-flags," Puss proposed to Elsie. "No; if we go away, the boys will eat everything up. Just look at them! Did ever you see such eatists? You boys, stop eating all the lunch." "Aint you girls getting 'ha'nted?'" Luke asked. "If you don't come soon, there wont be left for you." "I believe that's so," said Puss confidentially to Elsie. "I reckon we'll have to take our share now, or not at all. We've got to eat in self-defense." And so it came about that those five ridiculous children sat there, less than a mile on their journey, and less than an hour from their breakfast, and ate, ate, ate, till there was nothing of their lunch left except a half biscuit and a chicken neck. John, fertile in invention, proposed that they should go back home and get something more for dinner; but Puss said everybody would laugh at them, and Elsie thought they wouldn't be able to eat anything more that day, and, if they should be hungry, they could have a fish-fry. "Aint no use totin' this yere basekit 'long no mawr," Jacob Isaac suggested. "I'll leave it hang in this yere sass'fras saplin'." When it was intimated that it would be needed for the remainder of the lunch, he said there wasn't any "'mainder." "What's lef' needn't pester you-all; I'll jis eat it." Arrived at the water, the boys baited the hooks, at which the girls gave little shrieks, and hid their eyes, demanding to know of the boys how they would like to be treated as they were treating the worms. "The poor creatures!" said Puss. "So helpless!" added Elsie, peeping through her fingers at the boys. "Aren't the hooks ready yet?" "Yours is," and Luke delivered a rod into her hands. "And here's yours, Puss," John said. "Drop it in." Soon there were five rods extended over the water, and five corks were floating which might have told of robbed molasses-jugs and vinegar-jugs, and five young people were laughing, and talking nonsense by the---- How is nonsense estimated? Everybody kept asking everybody else if he had had a bite, and everybody was guilty of giving false alarms. As for Elsie, she shrieked out, "A bite!" at every provocation,--whenever the current bore unusually against her line, when the floating hook dragged bottom or encountered a twig. "Jupiter!" said John, growing impatient at the idle drifting of his cork. "I can't stand this, Elsie. You girls stop talking. You chatter like magpies; you scare the fish. Girls oughtn't ever to go fishing." Jacob Isaac snickered, and remarked _sotto voce_: "He talks hisse'f maw 'n the res' of the ladies." Elsie did not heed John's attack. Her eye was riveted on her bobbing cork; her cheeks were glowing with excitement; her heart was beating wildly. There was a pulling at her line. "Keep quiet!" she called. "I've got a bite."