If a chap lays hold o' your ferret, he won't be long before he hollows out a good un, _he_ won't." At this moment a striking incident made the boys pause suddenly in their walk.

It was the plunging of some small body in the water from among the neighboring bulrushes; if it was not a water-rat, Bob intimated that he was ready to undergo the most unpleasant consequences.
"Hoigh! Yap,--hoigh! there he is," said Tom, clapping his hands, as the little black snout made its arrowy course to the opposite bank.
"Seize him, lad! seize him!" Yap agitated his ears and wrinkled his brows, but declined to plunge, trying whether barking would not answer the purpose just as well.
"Ugh! you coward!" said Tom, and kicked him over, feeling humiliated as a sportsman to possess so poor-spirited an animal.

Bob abstained from remark and passed on, choosing, however, to walk in the shallow edge of the overflowing river by way of change.
"He's none so full now, the Floss isn't," said Bob, as he kicked the water up before him, with an agreeable sense of being insolent to it.
"Why, last 'ear, the meadows was all one sheet o' water, they was." "Ay, but," said Tom, whose mind was prone to see an opposition between statements that were really accordant,--"but there was a big flood once, when the Round Pool was made.

_I_ know there was, 'cause father says so.

And the sheep and cows all drowned, and the boats went all over the fields ever such a way." "_I_ don't care about a flood comin'," said Bob; "I don't mind the water, no more nor the land.