All boys who fish know that these bugs carry stores of luck within their hard shells, and for one even to approach your line in his mad waltz is a sign of coming success, and should he actually touch the line and cling, it presages a big fish. But if you would propitiate the gods in most definite fashion before you cast line you should catch several lucky bugs, the more the better, bury them on the bank with their heads to the shore, and recite over them an incantation as follows: “Bug, bug, bug, I’ve spit on the worms I dug; Bug, bug, give me my wish, A great big string of great big fish.” Properly managed this was never known to fail; if it does it is because you have buried one or more of your bugs bottom up. It is not so easy to catch a lucky bug, however. He is a very modern type of monitor, for his engine power is of the highest, steam is always at the top notch, and he can dart away in a straight line with all the concentrated fury of a torpedo boat. Moreover, he is convertible, and I have seen him when completely surrounded by enemies become a submarine and dive straight for the bottom and stay there. He may have an oxygen tank; anyway, he doesn’t come up until he gets ready, when he appears fresh and hearty and ready for another waltz. A fellow surface sailor of his, or rather skipper, is a different type of bug. This is the water-strider, a veritable Cassius of the cove, with the lean and hungry look of an overgrown, underfed mosquito. There is no merry waltz with his fellows about this piratical-looking chap. He spreads his four long legs like a Maltese cross, and the tips of them are all that touch the water. These dent it into minute dimples, but do not penetrate, and his bug-ship skips energetically about on the four dents, hopping at times like a veritable flea. Sometimes he jumps a half-inch high and skitters along the surface as a boy skips a stone; again he poises, lowers his body till it all but rests on the water, then raises it till he is high on four stilts, and all the time not even his toes are wet. Entering the cove in mid-afternoon you might think the swooning heat had left it no life awake other than the water insects and the dragon-flies that race them in airship fashion above. Yet you have but to ground your canoe on a sedgy shallow, sit motionless, and wait. Nor have you to wait long. There is a breathless pause as if all things waited to see what this leviathan of the outer deep meant to do next; then a voice at your very elbow says reassuringly, “Tu-g-g-g!” That is as near as you can come to it with type. There are no characters that will express its guttural vehemence which strikes you like a blow on the chest, or its sympathetic resonance. Take your violin, drop the G string to a tension so low that it will hardly vibrate musically, then twang it. That suggests the tone. But you know it well enough without description.