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But Ned Hinkley
thought of all his neighbors, not omitting the two rival widows,
Mesdames Cooper and Thackeray.
Something too, there was in the sport, which, on the present
occasion, beguiled him rather longer than his wont. More than once
had his eye detected, from the advantageous and jutting rock where
he lay concealed, just above the water, the dark outlines of a
fish, one of the largest he had ever seen in the lake, whose brown
sides, and occasionally flashing fins, excited his imagination and
offered a challenge to his skill, which provoked him into something
like a feeling of personal hostility.
The fish moved slowly to and fro, not often in sight, but at such
regularly-recurring periods as to keep up the exciting desire which
his very first appearance had awakened in the mind of his enemy.
To Ned Hinkley he was the beau-ideal of the trout genius. He was
certainly the hermit-trout of the tarn. Such coolness, such strength,
such size, such an outline, and then such sagacity. That trout was
a triton among his brethren. A sort of Dr. Johnson among fishes.


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