For three days I was fed and clothed by them as if I had been a member of
the family.
Like a boy as I was, I had risen on the fourth morning at grey dawn, to be
aiding in dragging the fish--pond, so that it might be cleaned out.
This was an annual amusement, in which the young men and women in the
family, under happier circumstances, had been in the invariable custom of
joining; and, changed as these were, they still preserved the fashion.
The seine was cast in at one end, loaded at the bottom with heavy sinks,
and buoyant at the top with cork floats. We hauled it along the whole
length of the pond, thereby driving the fish into an enclosure, about
twenty feet square, with a sluice towards the pond, and another fronting
the dull ditch that flowed past beyond it. Whenever we had hunted the
whole of the finny tribes--(barring those slippery youths the eels, who,
with all their cleverness, were left to dry in the mud)--into the toils,
we filled all the tubs, and pots, and pans, and vessels of all kinds and
descriptions, with the fat, honest looking Dutchmen, the carp and tench,
who really submitted to their captivity with all the resignation of most
ancient and quiet fish, scarcely indicating any sense of its irksomeness,
except by a lumbering sluggish flap of their broad heavy tails.
A transaction of this kind could not take place amongst a group of young
folk without shouts of laughter, and it was not until we had caught the
whole of the fish in the pond, and placed them in safety, that I had
leisure to look about me.
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