258 Modern Fishculture in Fresh and Salt Water. 



that I would not promise to find the trouble, and inti- 

 mated that my honorarium would be $25 and expenses 

 for an inspection. He agreed. His fish were in bad 

 shape ; he had hatched trout successfully the winter be- 

 fore and now fungus attacked every dead egg before it 

 had been dead half a day. I tasted the water, but 

 learned nothing from that; looked over the ponds and 

 their inlets without finding anything wrong, and to all 

 his questions merely replied that so far there was no 

 visible cause for the trouble. We went to dinner and I 

 was too worried to eat much. Perhaps this man, whom 

 I had never met before, thought me a fraud, and while 

 my time was valuable to me, I resolved that I would 

 not take his money if I could do him no good. After 

 dinner I proposed a trip to the springs at the head of 

 his little stream. There was a marshy piece of wood- 

 land, and in rubber boots we went into it. There, 

 draining into his ponds, was a horse which had died 

 three months before. My advice was : "Haul that 

 horse out and bury it where no water from it will flow 

 into your springs. Get a barrel of quicklime and cover 

 the spot where he lies and also over all the space you 

 may drag him where the surface water may flow into 

 your springs." 



He looked astonished and said : ''Quicklime will 

 kill trout, and if I do that they will all die. How 

 does that horse, which died last fall, make my trout 

 woolly?" 



I told him about the "woolly" growth from dead ani- 

 mal matter and explained that quicklime only killed 

 trout because it was "quick," and that well-slacked lime 

 would not hurt his fish, and that his barrel of lime 

 would be very dead before it trickled through the 

 swamp to his ponds, but would at once kill all the 



