He took his position on the turfy bank over against the leveret, and at once began whipping together the three pieces of the rod he had removed from the cloth case, working with extreme haste as if he feared that the fish would cease to rise before he was ready. When the joints were securely tied, he fixed the reel, ran the line through the rings, and attached the cast with coch-y-bondhu for end fly, and red palmer for dropper. Surely he is too impatient to soak the gut before casting; no, he flings it into the little creek at his side and, to kill the time of waiting, paces nervously up and down the bank. After four turns he took up the rod and began casting, the flies falling lightly on the rippled surface. At the third throw he was fast in a fish, but just failed to steer it clear of a bed of weeds for which it made, and consequently lost it. At the very next cast, when the flies fell close to the hatch, he rose and hooked a bigger fish. This leapt out of the water and broke its hold. He was much vexed, as the suddenly compressed lips showed, but as he was about to give vent to his feelings a still larger fish rose under the bank, close to the leveret. This sight checked the word on the very tip of his tongue. The cast, a long one even from the edge of the bank to which he now moved up, was rendered difficult if not impossible by the withies, which twice caught the tail-fly at the beginning of the forward cast and as often caused the Squire to give utterance to a monosyllable delivered with staccato sharpness. At length he succeeded in clearing the withies and getting the line out to its full length. It was a good, clean cast, and would have been perfect had the pool been a yard wider; as it was, the coch-y-bondhu caught in the rushes and, despite the coaxing treatment to which the Squire subjected it, refused to come away, the only result being to alarm the hare and raise the ire of the angler. Worse was to come; for presently the trout, which kept rising with irritating persistence, seized the dropper, hooked itself, and in the violent struggle that followed broke the tackle and got away with the red palmer in its jaw.