Sea -Trout Fishing. \ 535 



canoes, sending the passenger to scramble along a rough path 

 among the cliffs, from which he looks down on their dwindled, strug- 

 gling figures, and faintly hears their shouts. They meet again at 

 the fall, round which, of course, the canoes are portaged, or slid 

 down through a side chute, and we have passed the portal of the 

 upper stream, and bid it farewell. 



Three days of the best work for one rod in the upper waters, 

 noted on the score in separate years, are: $7 fish of 79 pounds, 41 

 fish of 83 }£ pounds, 39 fish of %(>% pounds. 



If the day of coming down to the home pool has been properly 

 timed, its evening will be prolonged over the camp-fire to watch the 

 full moon rise above a clump of pointed spruces fronting the tent. 

 She brings the promise of a new run of fish, filling the pools after 

 their week's rest, with occasional fine trout among them, lingering 

 behind the seniors on their way up. A sweet sense of civilization 

 attends the return from the deeper forests to bed and board, and the 

 camp seems even neat and spacious after rougher quarters. The 

 black flies are gone, and the mosquitoes only weakly wicked. Some- 

 times at morning frost sprinkles the ground, the days grow cooler, 

 and the nights cold, till we sympathize with the man of old who 

 cried, " Aha ! I am warm ; I have seen the fire," and enjoy the mere 

 animal pleasure of heat. The men turn and resalt their fish, stowed 

 in broad troughs of hemlock bark. The smell attracts small animals, 

 and sometimes there is an alarm in camp that a bear has snuffed 

 them out, and running out with the gun in the chilly night air, you 

 catch sight of a lynx making off with one in his mouth. The sport 

 is still fine; the fish, though not quite of the size of those earlier, 

 rising and running with a dash. But the stores are dwindling, the 

 canoes get leaky in spite of pitching, and the weather turns windy 

 and changeable. The dull boom of the fog-gun from the light- house 

 island — thirty miles off on the south shore of the great river — rolls 

 oftener up the valley with a warning that autumn mists are gathering 

 and autumn storms brewing. There steals on a sense of having been 

 a month without telegrams or letters, and suddenly some morn- 

 ing you say " enough," and order the flotilla down to the chaloupe 

 with everything not needed for one day more. Next day, after an 

 early breakfast, we strike tents, pitch the table and chairs into the 

 bushes to save them from spring floods, pack the canoes with what 



