30 AMERICAN GAME FISHES. 



is no doubt of this wonderful growth. Marked fish have 

 been known to treble their weight in a twelve-month. 



Late spawning fish generally drop down the river with the 

 "June rise" in a most emaciated and ravenous condition, and 

 are often picked up by the angler, greatly to his disgust, for 

 their stomachs have shrunk entirely away, their skin hangs 

 in flabby folds, their scales have all sloughed off, and they 

 seem to be nothing but back, head, and tail. Such objects 

 are called "Kelts," and they play havoc with everything that 

 has fins, destroying great quantities of small Salmon in their 

 ravenous raids for food. 



Very different is the first-run Salmon, just from the sea, 

 with his plump and shapely form, broad shoulders, and glisten- 

 ing armature of blue and silver scales, leaping for joy at his 

 escape from the dangers of the passage, and dallying with 

 the pleasures and incidents of the way. To catch one of 

 these magnificent fish, to have him on your line, for an hour 

 at a time, to be intimate with him, as it were, is an experi- 

 ence which no one can appreciate who has not been through 

 the ordeal: for an ordeal it is, of the most trying sort. In 

 his "Pleasures of Angling," Mr. George Dawson describes his 

 sensations on capturing his first Salmon, in a most realistic 

 way. It seems he had raised his fish once, and looked him 

 full in the face, as one glares at a ghost, as' he came to the 

 surface with great cavernous mouth wide open, and eyes 

 which bulged far out into the air; and he had gone through 

 all the feelings of faintness peculiar to similar occasions, with 

 nerve twinges, electrical thrills, etc., when, having pulled 

 himself together, he had a second rise. "I had marked the 

 spot," he says, "where the fish had risen, had gathered up my 

 line for another cast, had dropped the fly, like a snow-flake, 

 just where I desired it to rest, when, like a flash, the same 

 enormous head appeared, the same open jaws revealed them- 

 selves, a swirl and a leap and a strike followed, and my first 

 Salmon was hooked with a thud! which told me, as plainly 



