196 AMERICAN ANGLER'S BOOK. 



transparent hue, each egg showing in its centre a small dark 

 spot, which is the embryo of the future fish. The young fish 

 are hatched out in two or three months, and appear somewhat 

 larger than the little wriggle-tails in a barrel of stale rain- 

 water. They have large prominent eyes and little pot-bellies, 

 ichthyologically termed "umbilical bladders," in which is 

 stored the sustenance left from the egg, and which lasts three 

 or four weeks, or until they commence seeking their own 

 food. By this time they have grown to an inch and a half 

 long ; they then seek the shallows and gentle margins of the 

 brook, or smaller rills, and commence feeding on minute 

 aquatic insects and the larva of flies. 



It is surprising how small a quantity of running water will 

 sustain a school of young Trout. I have seen a half dozen 

 in a track left by a horse's foot, in a mossy spring branch. 

 Trout have the same dusky patches or finger-marks, that all 

 their congeners have, when young. As far as I have observed, 

 they rarely attain a size beyond four or five inches during the 

 first summer in our mountain streams. They seldom venture 

 into the larger waters until the second summer, when they 

 are the little fingerlings that jump at one's droppers, as he is 

 killing their progenitor on the stretcher-fly. 



At our noonings, when we have emptied our creels to 

 select the larger fish for a roast, or a bake under the ashes, I 

 have placed the whole catch in a row, the smallest at one end, 

 increasing in size to the largest at the other end, and en- 

 deavored to theorize as to their ages, or separate the year- 

 lings from the two year old, and those of three from those of 

 four years; but have never been able to draw a line separating, 

 with any degree of certainty, the fish of a year from those of 

 two, or those of two from those of three years, and so on to 

 the largest. No general rule as to their growth could be 

 laid down, unless all the fish of one year had been hatched 



