Sea -Trout Fishing. 



527 









across at very low water, but with 

 considerable risk, on account of the 

 irregular, slippery foothold and the 

 tearing current. The ascent or de- 

 scent of a rapid is exciting, even with- 

 out the trifle of danger it brings. 

 The whispering ripple of the water 

 deepens into an angry rush as you 

 approach. At the head or foot the 

 pitch looks much sharper than it 

 really is, the eye taking in the fore- 

 shortened incline. Down among 

 crowded clusters of rocks, now seen, 

 now swept under, the flood comes 

 bounding, coiling, and shattered. 

 Every epithet in Southey's particu- 

 larly foolish piece of nursery drivel, 

 the "Cataract of Lodore," might find 

 reality and echo here. 



In this sort of surf, half stone, half 

 water, a common wooden boat would 

 be bumped to pieces in five minutes. 

 The only thing that can float in 

 it, the birch canoe, is one of those 

 marvels of clever adaptation that look 

 like genius. Such a canoe is really 

 nothing but a basket with pointed 

 ends and stiffened sides. You sit, 

 float, and toss in her as you would in 

 a basket, and without most watchful 

 perpendicularity and tiresome tension 

 of nerves in balance, you tip out of 

 her as you would out of a basket. 

 She is a mere single skin of bark 

 sewed together with deer-sinews, VAUh ' 



rimmed with slight ash or birch strips, and connected across at top 

 by five slender thwarts, or "bords," modeled in all her lines so that 

 the deepest point is along the middle bottom, and she turns in the 



