Crockers Hole | Page 2

or whether she "consisted" throughout,--as our cousins
across the water express it,--is known to their manes only. Enough that
she would not have the floury lad; and that he, after giving in his books
and money, sought an untimely grave among the trout. And this was
the first pool below the bread-walk deep enough to drown a five-foot
baker boy. Sad it was; but such things must be, and bread must still be
delivered daily.
A truce to such reflections,--as our foremost writers always say, when
they do not see how to go on with them,--but it is a serious thing to
know what Crocker's Hole was like; because at a time when (if he had
only persevered, and married the maid, and succeeded to the oven, and
reared a large family of short-weight bakers) he might have been

leaning on his crutch beside the pool, and teaching his grandson to
swim by precept (that beautiful proxy for practice)--at such a time, I
say, there lived a remarkably fine trout in that hole. Anglers are
notoriously truthful, especially as to what they catch, or even more
frequently have not caught. Though I may have written fiction, among
many other sins,--as a nice old lady told me once,--now I have to deal
with facts; and foul scorn would I count it ever to make believe that I
caught that fish. My length at that time was not more than the butt of a
four-jointed rod, and all I could catch was a minnow with a pin, which
our cook Lydia would not cook, but used to say, "Oh, what a shame,
Master Richard! they would have been trout in the summer, please God!
if you would only a' let 'em grow on." She is living now, and will bear
me out in this.
But upon every great occasion there arises a great man; or to put it
more accurately, in the present instance, a mighty and distinguished
boy. My father, being the parson of the parish, and getting, need it be
said, small pay, took sundry pupils, very pleasant fellows, about to
adorn the universities. Among them was the original "Bude Light," as
he was satirically called at Cambridge, for he came from Bude, and
there was no light in him. Among them also was John Pike, a born
Zebedee, if ever there was one.
John Pike was a thick-set younker, with a large and bushy head, keen
blue eyes that could see through water, and the proper slouch of
shoulder into which great anglers ripen; but greater still are born with it;
and of these was Master John. It mattered little what the weather was,
and scarcely more as to the time of year, John Pike must have his
fishing every day, and on Sundays he read about it, and made flies. All
the rest of the time he was thinking about it.
My father was coaching him in the fourth book of the Æneid and all
those wonderful speeches of Dido, where passion disdains construction;
but the only line Pike cared for was of horsehair. "I fear, Mr. Pike, that
you are not giving me your entire attention," my father used to say in
his mild dry way; and once when Pike was more than usually abroad,
his tutor begged to share his meditations. "Well, sir," said Pike, who

was very truthful, "I can see a green drake by the strawberry tree, the
first of the season, and your derivation of 'barbarous' put me in mind of
my barberry dye." In those days it was a very nice point to get the right
tint for the mallard's feather.
No sooner was lesson done than Pike, whose rod was ready upon the
lawn, dashed away always for the river, rushing headlong down the hill,
and away to the left through a private yard, where "no thoroughfare"
was put up, and a big dog stationed to enforce it. But Cerberus himself
could not have stopped John Pike; his conscience backed him up in
trespass the most sinful when his heart was inditing of a trout upon the
rise.
All this, however, is preliminary, as the boy said when he put his
father's coat upon his grandfather's tenterhooks, with felonious intent
upon his grandmother's apples; the main point to be understood is this,
that nothing--neither brazen tower, hundred-eyed Argus, nor Cretan
Minotaur--could stop John Pike from getting at a good stickle. But,
even as the world knows nothing of its greatest men, its greatest men
know nothing of the world beneath their very nose, till fortune sneezes
dexter. For two years John Pike must have been whipping the water as
hard as Xerxes, without having ever once dreamed of the glorious trout
that lived in Crocker's Hole. But why, when he ought to have