AGAINST THE STREAM 305 



in the swift, smooth, sullen water above the fall. There was 

 pathos in the passiveness with which the unsuccessful 

 swimmer let himself be swirled back to the eddies at the 

 foot of the ladder. Like a spent horse, he could no more ; 

 but one knew that he was setting his teeth, so to speak, 

 for the next rush. One wished to know many things 

 whether the males or females got up first, whether it had 

 become a matter of course to the old salmon, how often the 

 young grilse required to try, and how they felt when they 

 were baffled. 



There are many ways of looking at such sights. The 

 practical point of view was well represented by the crowd 

 of town's boys. How many of them had " cleeks " n 

 their trousers, no one could tell ; but there were rumours 

 of a suspicious abundance of appetising fish - suppers 

 in the town. Probably the Game Laws do express a 

 certain sense of the sportsmanlike, and it seemed a 

 shame to cleek a "breathless" fish which a side current 

 carried shorewards. Yet as their fathers and grand- 

 fathers had held these to be part of the year's spoil, the 

 youths naturally resented any attempt to prevent them 

 from doing what had always been done. And there were 

 many fishes, for we were able to count fifty-one leaps in a 

 minute. It is easy to be " moral " about poaching after a 

 good breakfast, but what would the natural man have done 

 had he been hungry ? There is delight in the cutlets of 

 even a fasting salmon, and there is a monotony about 

 porridge and respectability. 



The erudite scientific person was also represented. He 

 did not care for salmon-cutlets. Protoplasm and the 

 centrosomes for him ! Given, he said, the force of the 

 current, given an integrated aggregate of complex molecules 

 (called for convenience Salmo salar), with an inherited 

 nervous mechanism, explosive muscle-cells, and all the rest 

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