278 AMERICAN GAME FISHES, 



haps be conveyed by a narration of a day's experience in it, 

 than in any other way, and this I will venture to give. 



On a bright morning in May, 1888, I left Tacoma, Wash- 

 ington, on an east-bound Northern Pacific train, and after 

 riding some distance up the Puyallup Valley I left it, crossed 

 through some heavily-timbered foot-hills and emerged on 

 Green river, a good-siz'ed stream that rolls down out of the 

 Cascade Mountains. At the first station on this stream, I 

 went forward and got on the engine in order to get a better 

 view of it. I had been over this part of the road before, but 

 in the night, and had not seen this stream. I inquired of the 

 engineer and fireman concerning the fishing, and they said it 

 was good; that several large catches had been made within 

 the past two weeks, and that one Trout weighing seven 

 pounds had been taken a few miles above where we then 

 were. 



The fever began to come on me at once, and as we thun- 

 dered round the short curves and sped along rocky walls, ten 

 or twenty feet above the stream, as we rolled over the nu- 

 merous bridges whence I looked into the sparkling, eddying 

 pools and saw great dark-backed Trout, darting hither and 

 thither in flight from the rumbling monster above them, 1 be- 

 came more and more nervous. Great mountains rose from the 

 bed of the river, and here and there the stream hewed its way 

 through imposing ledges of granite. Occasionally the engi- 

 neer would call my attention to a dissolving view of old Mount 

 Tacoma, now but a few miles away, as we sped by an open- 

 ing in the foot-hills. Then he would point out a rugged 

 mountain side, whereon some hunter of his acquaintance had 

 slain a bear, or a dark canycm wherein someone else had 

 killed a cougar, or a clump of pines in which a big elk had fall- 

 en a prey to still another sportsman. Then he would tell of 

 the sheep and goats on the peaks farther back, of the trail to 

 Tacoma and of the coal mines back in the hills. But though 

 all these thinirs would have been full of interest to me at 



