1 68 WILD LIFE AT HOME. 



weeks after we had missed him, he walked into a 

 room where I was sitting writing and came quite 

 sedately up on to a hearthrug close to my feet. 



Trout have many interesting little habits that 

 even the man who tries to deceive them with an 

 artificial fly does not know much about. Those 

 living in shallow, rapid streams come right out to 

 the very edges in search of larvse during summer 

 nights, and as the light from a bull's-eye lantern 

 fills them with a kind of staring curiosity they can 

 be photographed by the aid of a flash-lamp. I have 

 often seen them searching for food in water so 

 shallow that their backs were not covered. Owls 

 and cats occasionally profit by a discovery of this 

 nocturnal boldness. 



In the autumn trout begin to ascend rivers and 

 brooks in order to get to their breeding quarters 

 in small sluggish streams with sandy bottoms if 

 possible, and upon their journey encounter such 

 obstacles as weirs and waterfalls, which they may 

 be seen leaping almost every minute for days to- 

 gether, thus affording an opportunity for any enter- 

 prising camera man. Artificial light exercises almost 

 as great a fascination over trout as it does over 

 moths. I have, when helping experimentalists in 

 pisciculture, put a small hand net down in the 

 bottom of little streams which I could easily stride 

 across anywhere, and then attracted such a crowd 

 of wondering fish over it with the rays from a 

 bull's-eye that I caught three or four at a time by 



