Such, in brief, is the _modus operandi_ of the crawfisher. We all knew the way to do it, we of the Sairki party; and the tying on of the bait and the placing of the sticks were finished as quickly as these operations could be performed with a due regard to efficiency, lots having decided the portion of bank to be worked by each of us. Then came the quarter of an hour during which it is the etiquette of the crawfisher to allow his prey to discover and to enjoy undisturbed the refreshments provided for him. I do not know whether schoolboys possess souls--presumably they are provided with a special schoolboy quality--but in any case we, at least, were entirely unable to possess those souls in patience, and that little quarter of an hour was spent by each of us upon his own portion of bank under a carking sense of grievance. We felt that we were conceding too much to the crawfish. Personally I passed my fifteen minutes at full length in the long grass, within a yard or two of the water, and any one but a schoolboy would have been glad enough of the opportunity to lie thus beneath the brilliant northern August sky upon a bed of wild flowers, which, if one chose to sit still and pick one specimen of each, would have filled his hands with a hundred delicate stems without the necessity to stretch beyond an easy arm-reach. I have never seen any place that equalled the country about Mourino for the wealth and variety of its wild flowers, or the luxuriance of the ground-berries in the woods--Arctic strawberry, bilberry, cranberry, raspberry, and a berry which I remember as making the most delicious bitter-sweet jam, called brousnika. As for the flowers, the anemone is the only representative of our familiar spring visitors, but the summer months are gorgeous with every blossom that our own English fields can boast, with few exceptions, besides lilies of the valley, linnæa borealis, a lovely creeping plant with a tiny starry flower; "star of Bethlehem," and other varieties not often seen in this country.