And out he went, and left us alone.
We could not take our eyes off the fish after that. It really was a remarkably fine fish. We were still looking at it, when the local carrier, who had just stopped at the inn, came to the door of the room with a pot of beer in his hand, and he also looked at the fish.
"Good-sized trout, that," said George, turning round to him.
"Ah! you may well say that, sir," replied the man; and then, after a pull at his beer, he added, "Maybe you wasn't here, sir, when that fish was caught?"
"No," we told him. We were strangers in the neighbourhood.
"Ah!" said the carrier, "then, of course, how should you? It was nearly five years ago that I caught that trout."
"Oh! was it you who caught it, then?" said I.
"Yes, sir," replied the genial old fellow. "I caught him just below the lock - leastways, what was the lock then - one Friday afternoon; and the remarkable thing about it is that I caught him with a fly. I'd gone out pike fishing, bless you, never thinking of a trout, and when I saw that whopper on the end of my line, blest if it didn't quite take me aback.
Well, you see, he weighed twenty-six pound. Good-night, gentlemen, good-night."
Five minutes afterwards, a third man came in, and described how he had caught it early one morning, with bleak; and then he left, and a stolid, solemn-looking, middle-aged individual came in, and sat down over by the window.
None of us spoke for a while; but, at length, George turned to the new comer, and said:
"I beg your pardon, I hope you will forgive the liberty that we - perfect strangers in the neighbourhood - are taking, but my friend here and myself would be so much obliged if you would tell us how you caught that trout up there."
"Why, who told you I caught that trout!" was the surprised query.
We said that nobody had told us so, but somehow or other we felt instinctively that it was he who had done it.
"Well, it's a most remarkable thing - most remarkable," answered the stolid stranger, laughing; "because, as a matter of fact, you are quite right. I did catch it. But fancy your guessing it like that. Dear me, it's really a most remarkable thing."
And then he went on, and told us how it had taken him half an hour to land it, and how it had broken his rod. He said he had weighed it carefully when he reached home, and it had turned the scale at thirty-four pounds.
He went in his turn, and when he was gone, the landlord came in to us.
We told him the various histories we had heard about his trout, and he was immensely amused, and we all laughed very heartily.
"Fancy Jim Bates and Joe Muggles and Mr. Jones and old Billy Maunders all telling you that they had caught it. Ha! ha! ha! Well, that is good," said the honest old fellow, laughing heartily. "Yes, they are the sort to give it ME, to put up in MY parlour, if THEY had caught it, they are!
Ha! ha! ha!"
And then he told us the real history of the fish. It seemed that he had caught it himself, years ago, when he was quite a lad; not by any art or skill, but by that unaccountable luck that appears to always wait upon a boy when he plays the wag from school, and goes out fishing on a sunny afternoon, with a bit of string tied on to the end of a tree.
He said that bringing home that trout had saved him from a whacking, and that even his school-master had said it was worth the rule-of-three and practice put together.
He was called out of the room at this point, and George and I again turned our gaze upon the fish.
It really was a most astonishing trout. The more we looked at it, the more we marvelled at it.
It excited George so much that he climbed up on the back of a chair to get a better view of it.
And then the chair slipped, and George clutched wildly at the trout-case to save himself, and down it came with a crash, George and the chair on top of it.
"You haven't injured the fish, have you?" I cried in alarm, rushing up.
"I hope not," said George, rising cautiously and looking about.
But he had. That trout lay shattered into a thousand fragments - I say a thousand, but they may have only been nine hundred. I did not count them.
We thought it strange and unaccountable that a stuffed trout should break up into little pieces like that.
And so it would have been strange and unaccountable, if it had been a stuffed trout, but it was not.
That trout was plaster-of-Paris.
