THE COOKERY OF THE SALMON 195 



often pay the inevitable penalty. The pools he must 

 pass above the harbour mouth have been converted 

 by sewage and the shipping into cesspools. As he 

 ascends, he swallows the diluted products of iron- 

 works, dyeworks, paper mills, and pestilential alkali 

 factories. In fact, when brought to bank by rod or 

 net, he is an animated filter, having assimilated, 

 thanks to a sound constitution, all manner of dele- 

 terious abominations. Still, like a disreputable pro- 

 digal, he may keep up a decent appearance, and the 

 wary buyer may be let in, unless he can trust his fish- 

 monger ; but happily these medicated fish are much 

 in the minority, so that there are long odds against 

 blood-poisoning or unpleasant but less serious con- 

 sequences. 



There is little to be said about foreign salmon, 

 though not a few are imported from Holland, and 

 many more from Sweden, Norway, and Russia. 

 Scandinavian salmon run to a great size and arc 

 decidedly coarser than our own. The Rhine salmon 

 are, or used to be, very good, but the Rhine has been 

 foully polluted, like Thames or Tyne, with the indus- 

 trial expansion of Imperial Ciermanv. The pools 

 below the romantic rocks of the legendary Lurlei 

 used to yield 6,000 Ib. a year to the fishermen of 

 St. ( ioar and ( 'ronrhau^en. Now, we believe, the annual 



