CHAPTER XVI. 



A JUNE RISE ON THE GODBOUT. 



HON. ALLAN GILMOUR, Scotchman, the hospitable laird of the Godbout river 

 in lower Canada, who for thirty years has almost annually whipped its creamy 

 waters for salmon, is dead. Let every mourner drop a stone. He fell asleep by the 

 Lethe side at Ottawa last February, in the ripeness of years and full of honors, and 

 now the pools will rest. His age was 79. 



Many were the honored guests among clergy, nobility and laymen who partook 

 of his sumptuous bounty in the midsummer outings at the camp. He was super- 

 lative as a host, and as an angler peerless. No such doughty wielder of the two 

 handed rod as he. His river record was never beaten. Bereavement falls upon the 

 craftsmen heavily, like the penumbra of an eclipse. Life long friends lament him 

 as a good man gone, jovial and companionable. The civic record says: "His 

 name was associated with every good work in Ottawa, and his purse was always open 

 to every benevolent and deserving cause." 



Mr. Gilmour was a bachelor millionaire, domiciled with his nephew, John 

 Manuel, who now inherits his possessions, and to a degree his proclivities and his 

 worth. Of the many elegant private residences of the Dominion capital his was the 

 most pretentious. It is located on the verge of the limestone cliff whose base is 

 washed by the swirl of the Ridean Falls, and under the very aegis of the Parliament 

 buildings whose clustering towers and aspiring dome overlook a great natural basin 

 enclosed by circumvallant hills clothed with forest. This mansion has an aristo- 

 cratic bearing of the Old World order. Lofty walls of stone and gates of iron 

 enclose its servants' quarters. Palms, magnolias bananas, orchids, oleanders and 

 other tropical plants flourish under glass. Heads of buffalo, moose, deer and caribou, 

 and various trophies of the chase adorn the halls; and in the picture gallery is the 

 finest collection of paintings in Canada, many of them purchased by the proprietor 

 at great expense during extended travels in Europe and Africa, and fully one-third 

 illustrating wild life on the remote frontiers of the Dominion. (One of these 

 subject was reproduced recently as a reminiscence of the "Glassy Pool" on the 

 Godbout) . 



From a terrace on the crest of a cliff a flight of 115 steps descends to a rustic 

 boat-landing by the river margin beneath, where the famous steam yacht, "Cruiser," 

 the hero of many adventurous voyages, sometimes lies ; more luxurious in her ap- 

 pointments than Cleopatra's barge, more sumptuous than a Pullman palace car. She 

 is eighty-five feet long, as staunch and steady in a sea-way as the great mail steamers ; 

 and I can fairly see her now, as I recall a former voyage, taking the combers of the 

 St. Lawrence rapids in flying leaps as she speeds her way down river from Ottawa 

 to Quebec, the starting point for the lower river, Morituri salutaris. 



The events of fifteen years ago come back, dear, reader, as vividly as if no 

 interval lay between ; as if the grand old sportsman were not already dead and buried 

 and wrapped in his winding sheet, stark and stiff. In my mind's eye I see him 

 standing on the quarter deck, six feet four inches high in bodily presence, sniffing 

 the first whiff of the salt sea air from the Gulf, as the bow of the sturdy craft 

 dips into the whitening foam, buffeting the surges and throwing them aside as she 



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