But whether we were afraid or not, I am sure I cannot tell, because it is so long ago; but I think that had something to do with it.

For Bagworthy water ran out of Doone valley, a mile or so from the mouth of it.
But when I was turned fourteen years old, and put into good small-clothes, buckled at the knee, and strong blue worsted hosen, knitted by my mother, it happened to me without choice, I may say, to explore the Bagworthy water.

And it came about in this wise.
My mother had long been ailing, and not well able to eat much; and there is nothing that frightens us so much as for people to have no love of their victuals.

Now I chanced to remember that once at the time of the holidays I had brought dear mother from Tiverton a jar of pickled loaches, caught by myself in the Lowman river, and baked in the kitchen oven, with vinegar, a few leaves of bay, and about a dozen pepper-corns.
And mother had said that in all her life she had never tasted anything fit to be compared with them.

Whether she said so good a thing out of compliment to my skill in catching the fish and cooking them, or whether she really meant it, is more than I can tell, though I quite believe the latter, and so would most people who tasted them; at any rate, I now resolved to get some loaches for her, and do them in the self-same manner, just to make her eat a bit.
There are many people, even now, who have not come to the right knowledge what a loach is, and where he lives, and how to catch and pickle him.