66 With Rod and Gu?i hi New England 



trout of the Rangeleys were necessarily scores of years old, as some claim 

 they are ; they have an enormous food supply." 



" You are right," said I, " I 've seen minnows so plentiful in those 

 waters that they actually seemed like clouds or masses of drift stuff mov- 

 ing through the water ; millions seemed to be in some of the schools ; with 

 such an abundance of food any suitable waters can grow large trout. I 

 was reading last spring a report of the discussion of the American Fish- 

 eries Society at the meeting in 1896, in which one of the speakers stated 

 that he had raised a brook trout which, in three years from the egg, weighed 

 four pounds and ten ounces ! Think of a trout only three years old weigh- 

 ing almost five pounds." 



" Of course it was reared and fed artificially," said the Judge ; " liver- 

 fed trout grow rapidly, I know, but they have n't the flavor of the wild 

 trout; there 's nothing, in my opinion, like the little mountain brook trout." 



" I know that," I replied," I am simply showing that the great in- 

 crease of size in the fish depends on the food supply. I well remember a 

 captive trout we had at home, in my boyhood days, which we kept in a 

 large deep spring which supplied, through pipes, our own and some of the 

 neighboring families with water. The water of the spring was as clear as 

 crystal, and the trout had for food only such grasshoppers and other 

 insects as fell into the water. That trout weighed about a half pound 

 when it was put into the spring ; it lived there about three years, and in all 

 that time it did not gain an inch in length or two ounces in weight. It 

 actually barely kept alive." 



" In the pure cold water of the spring," suggested the Judge, " there 

 were no aquatic insects or crustaceans, and the trout must have had a pretty 

 slim diet." 



" Precisely," I replied. " Now if that trout had had access to those 

 Rangeley minnows it would have increased in weight, well, say at least a 

 pound a year. I often visited the spring and dropped into it a grasshop- 

 per or cricket, and it barely touched the water before it was seized by the 

 hungry fish, and I have had him come up with a dart and take food from 

 my fingers." 



" The artificially-reared trout seem to meet the wants of many," said 

 the Doctor, " but I never cared for them ; in fact, I don't want any unless 

 they are taken from such water as ours were to-day ; the flavor of such 

 fish is delicate, the meat is red and with the proper modicum of fat in it." 



" Yes, but they are not gastronomically as good as a fresh-run sea 

 trout, " said the Judge. 



"Well, Judge," replied the Doctor, "I have yet to be convinced that 

 they are not the same fish. We have taken hundreds every year of so- 

 called sea trout, which had been in the river so long that they had lost 



