"What?  A trout!  Have you got one?"

"Certainly; I 've had him on for at least fifteen minutes.  I 'm
playing him Mr. Parsons' way.  You might as well light the lantern
and get the net ready; he's coming in towards the boat now."

Beekman broke three matches before he made the lantern burn; and
when he held it up over the gunwale, there was the trout sure
enough, gleaming ghostly pale in the dark water, close to the boat,
and quite tired out.  He slipped the net over the fish and drew it
in,--a monster.

"I 'll carry that trout, if you please," said Cornelia, as they
stepped out of the boat; and she walked into the camp, on the last
stroke of midnight, with the fish in her hand, and quietly asked for
the steelyard.

Eight pounds and fourteen ounces,--that was the weight.  Everybody
was amazed.  It was the "best fish" of the year.  Cornelia showed no
sign of exultation, until just as John was carrying the trout to the
ice-house.  Then she flashed out:--"Quite a fair imitation, Mr.
McTurk,--is n't it?"

Now McTurk's best record for the last fifteen years was seven pounds
and twelve ounces.

So far as McTurk is concerned, this is the end of the story.  But
not for the De Peysters.  I wish it were.  Beekman went to sleep
that night with a contented spirit.  He felt that his experiment in
education had been a success.  He had made his wife an angler.

He had indeed, and to an extent which he little suspected.  That
Upper Dam trout was to her like the first taste of blood to the
tiger.  It seemed to change, at once, not so much her character as
the direction of her vital energy.  She yielded to the lunacy of
angling, not by slow degrees, (as first a transient delusion, then a
fixed idea, then a chronic infirmity, finally a mild insanity,) but
by a sudden plunge into the most violent mania.  So far from being
ready to die at Upper Dam, her desire now was to live there--and to
live solely for the sake of fishing--as long as the season was open.