While thus the Brook was soliloquizing, a fish more cunning than the rest, had seized the worm within his mouth, and was swimming away to his favorite hole by an old willow stump to there complete a meal. He was just entering it, when the Brook saw him suddenly flash from her embrace, floundering and pulling as he went up, up through the air, unto the mossy bank above the rock from which fell the shadow of the boy. And now the Brook, more curious than ever, saw the face so like the laborer's daughter overspread with smiles as the tiny hands grasped the fish, and with a wrench tore out the worm from his gills, a piece of which fell on the Brook athwart the shadow of the laugher. "What a fine one!" said the boy, and started up;--started up to slip against a smooth worn stone, and fall over the rock into the Brook, close by the willow stump; the captive fish held tightly as he went, but slipping from the falling grasp into its welcome element once more. The Brook had never felt so hard a blow before. The rain and hail were nothing to this. It made her splash and leap and swell against the rocky bank, until she could have called with pain. How still the boy laid on her breast! his head against the willow stump, over which there trickled a tiny purple stream smaller than the spring-drops from the rock! How richly his golden locks floated upon the Brook! but how widely strained his bright blue eyes glaring at the sky and tree-tops above, and how he gasped from his mouth; a mouth so like the one the laborer had often prest in harvest-time to the Brook, when it was yet circling in the meadow! The Brook said to herself, "I will put some of my ripples into this mouth, as I have seen the laborer do; perhaps, like him, it will make his eye sparkle, and send him away again; for he lies heavy on my breast." And so the ripples went into the opened mouth by dozens; but the blue sky and tree-tops faded from his eyes, and the lips lost their bright color, and the purple trickling on the willow stump grew thick and settled into a dark pool. All night the dead boy lay upon the breast of the Brook; and the fishes played around him, wondering what it was; and the little insects hopped over him at early sunlight; until the purple pool dried up, and only left a stain behind. And soon the Brook heard the hum of voices sounding over the rocks, as she listened from her solitude; and soon more shadows fell upon her face. Then looking up she saw the laborer once again; and the Brook rejoiced to think perhaps she was going back again into her pleasant meadow. He had taken up the stick the boy had used; and was looking down below upon the Brook, as the face--the lovely face, with more of the old sorrow in it--of the laborer's daughter, raised itself above his shoulder. "My brother!--drowned and dead!--and no more to come home alive to share his sister's home."