THE DOCTOR'S STOKY. 43 



" They've a 'curious fish in the St. Lawrence," said the 

 doctor, as he knocked the ashes from his meerschaum, and 

 refilled it, " known among the fishermen of that river as the 

 LAWYER. I have never seen it among any Bother of the 

 waters of this country, and never there but once. It never 

 bites at a hook, and is taken only by gill-nets, or the seine. 

 Everybody," he continued, " has visited the Thousand Islands, 

 or if everybody has not, he had better go there at once. He 

 will find them, in the heat of summer, not only the coolest 

 and most healthful retreat, and the pleasantest scenery that 

 the eye ever rested upon, always excepting these beautiful 

 lakes, but the best river fishing I know of on this continent. 

 He will not, to be sure, take the speckled trout that we find 

 in this region, but he will be among the black bass, the 

 pickerel, muscalunge, and striped bass, in the greatest 

 abundance, and ready to answer promptly any reasonable 

 demand which he may make upon them. Think of reeling 

 in a twenty-pound pickerel, or a forty-pound mnscalunge, 

 on a line three hundred feet in length, playing him for half 

 an hour, and landing him safely in your boat at last I 

 There's excitement for you worth talking about. 



" I stopped over night at Cape Vincent, last summer, on 

 my way to ' the Thousand Islands,' on a fishing excursion of 

 a week. I was acquainted with an old fisherman of that 

 place, and agreed to go out with him the next morning, to 

 see what luck he had with the fish. I don't think much of 

 that kind of fishing, though it is well enough for those who 

 make a business of it, for the gill-net works, as the old man 



