And I will not tell them all about it, because if I did, very likely there would be no loaches left ten or twenty years after the appearance of this book.

A pickled minnow is very good if you catch him in a stickle, with the scarlet fingers upon him; but I count him no more than the ropes in beer compared with a loach done properly.
Being resolved to catch some loaches, whatever trouble it cost me, I set forth without a word to any one, in the forenoon of St.Valentine's day, 1675-6, I think it must have been.

Annie should not come with me, because the water was too cold; for the winter had been long, and snow lay here and there in patches in the hollow of the banks, like a lady's gloves forgotten.

And yet the spring was breaking forth, as it always does in Devonshire, when the turn of the days is over; and though there was little to see of it, the air was full of feeling.
It puzzles me now, that I remember all those young impressions so, because I took no heed of them at the time whatever; and yet they come upon me bright, when nothing else is evident in the gray fog of experience.

I am like an old man gazing at the outside of his spectacles, and seeing, as he rubs the dust, the image of his grandson playing at bo-peep with him.
But let me be of any age, I never could forget that day, and how bitter cold the water was.