WINTER TALKS ON SUMMER PASTIMES. 19 



wished within a mile from camp. On my recent visit it 

 took me a whole afternoon, casting over the same ground, 

 to catch enough for supper and breakfast. I was told they 

 were plenty as ever fifteen or twenty miles down stream, but 

 I didn't care to make the journey. I preferred to work for 

 what I caught, having long since ceased to find my highest 

 pleasure in angling where neither skill nor patience is re- 

 quired to fill my creel." 



"In what," I was asked, "do grayling, in their haunts and 

 habits, differ from trout?" 



"Their haunts are the same, in every material quality. 

 That is, the Au Sable has every feature of a trout stream, in 

 the clearness, flow and temperature of its water, and in its 

 ripples, eddies and pools. To simply look at it, any expert 

 would pronounce it as piomising a trout stream as he ever 

 saw. When I began to cast, I expected a rise from a trout 

 rather than from a grayling; but often as I have fished the 

 river I have never yet so much as seen a trout." 



"How do you account for their absence?" was the next 

 query. 



* 'I have been frequently asked that question, but I have 

 never been able to answer it, and the answer is all the more 

 puzzling from the fact that the earlier settlers have a tradi- 

 tion (and some assume to speak from personal knowledge) 

 that there was once trout in the river, and that even now 

 there are both trout and grayling in other waters not far off. 

 If the tradition is truthful in regard to this river, what has 

 become of the trout ? Have the grayling destroyed them? 

 If so, how did it happen, after having dwelt together in unity 

 since the creation, in these latter days 'the one has been 

 taken and the other left?' I know that trout have dis- 

 appeared from a great many streams because of the changed 

 temperature or diminished supply of the water, caused by 

 the artificial drainage of swamps, the absorption or diversion 

 of springs and the denudation of forests. But no such 

 causes have operated here. With isolated exceptions few 

 and far between the swamps and springs and forests re- 

 main as they were when 'the morning stars sang together.' 



