A JUNE RISE ON THE GODBOUT. H7 



bowls along. Such voyaging is the very ecstacy of exhillaration. And then the 

 anticipation of the sport that is to come when we iget below and the salmon strike in. 



As the late lamented Francis Francis of London Field writes in his rapturous 

 "Sporting Sketches," all alive to the spirit of the occasion : "It is a strange thing 

 how the very mention of salmon-fishing makes one prick up one's ears, and how the 

 thought of it sends a sort of thrill through pulses grown old and torpid, and how, 

 even when one is declining into the vale of years, the prospect of a week's good 

 flailing in a well stocked, kindly dispositioned river sets one's spirit bounding and 

 sparkling with delight. We chirrup and we sing. Very little makes us laugh, and 

 jokes which would have been regarded at any other time as very small beer are 

 now most excellent fooling. Ha, ha ! ho, ho ! Cackle, cackle ! Dash it all ! I feel 

 twenty years younger. By Jingo ! I feel thirty years younger. I feel I feel jolly 

 thirsty, old fellow don't you? Pass the lotion. Here's health to man and death 

 to fish !" 



Gilmour's bon hommie was just the same. His Scotch humor was always at the 

 fore, like the burgee of his yacht. 



Very few yachtsmen make the tour of the lower St. Lawrence, though its 

 salmon rivers are numerous. The distance is great ; the channel intricate and beset 

 with shoals, the scenery monotonous and depressing, and the expense heavy. Only 

 at a few eligible locations along shore are signs of human life here a fisherman's 

 cabin and there a solitary post of the Hudson Bay Company. The north coast 

 especially is for the most part bleak and forbidding desolation for hundreds of miles, 

 and the only creatures that exist there are the weird birds which love the crags 

 and the storm, the tumbling porpoises and the mysterious seals. From the abutting 

 promontory which forms Cape Diamond at Quebec to the castellated rocks at Henley 

 Harbor, near the eastern entrance of Belle Isle Strait, 800 miles away, there is an 

 almost unbroken wall of granite, except where it is slashed by the impetuous streams 

 which have cut their passage through its perpendicular face. These generally find 

 their sources in lakes situated far back on the extended plateau above, from sixty 

 to eighty miles away, and are mainly supplied by the melting of accumulated snows 

 of protracted winters. Some of them, like the Montmorenci, near Quebec, pitch over 

 an escarpment one hundred feet high or more. Others tumble to the sea in a series 

 of falls and cascades, set back in the rock canons, which are over-topped by forested 

 mountains, from which they emerge in varying moods of froth and eddy. Others 

 again make their exit by an almost continuous rapid, like a sluiceway. Most of 

 them are barricaded by insurmountable walls two or three miles above their mouths, 

 so that the salmon cannot ascend. At the same time, such as present a continuous 

 rapid, while they are most accessible to salmon are utterly impractible for the angler. 

 The number which afford conditions suitable for both fishes and fisherman, that is, 

 a succession of pools and rapids, either for a limited distance or throughout their 

 whole length is appreciably small. The Godbout is the very best of them all, both 

 for its scenic attractions and its comfort, and I shall never forget the sensation of 

 feeling snug when, after four days' perils were passed, we ran in under the hos- 

 pitable land and anchored out of the tide and the swell which rolled in from the 

 Gulf. The "Cruiser" seemed to know her holding ground instinctively, and her 

 anchor chain had hardly rattled out of the boxes when a school of grampuses began 

 to spout and sport alongside, and the usual attachments of boobies and gannets 

 swung out with cries and screams from the neighboring rocks to reconnoiter. At 

 once Napoleon Comeau, the river guardian, came aboard from a little hamlet on 

 the beach, and by dusk all the' stores were on barges en route to the camp, two miles 

 above. 



