376 Fisumye iv American WArTERS. 
short of the mature salmon. A shoal of them is like a joy- 
ous ball-party in full costume. It lacks the embonpoint of 
the salmon as much as the young people of a gay ball-party 
do that of their parents. The grilse—when attached to a 
hook—plays more gayly and with less judgment than does 
the full-grown salmon, skipping about and playing with great 
energy, and never stopping to sulk, or, more properly,to study 
the cause of its grief, antilit gayly darts up to the gaffer and 
falls an easy prey, as does the coquette to the practiced skill 
of a heart-thief 
Tue GRILSE. 
The grilse is the same fish which left its river asa smolt. In 
its ocean pastures, where it has spent one or two winters, it has 
doffed the clumsy guise of puppyhood, and the top of its head, 
dorsal, and caudal have become velvety, while the black beads 
on its gills and upper mandible begin to appear. It lacks 
the jetty intensity which the top of the head and some of the 
fins of the adult salmon disclose, but its white is equal in 
satiny sheen to the salmon of best condition. Its weight is 
from five to eight pounds, and, having never spawned, it fol- 
lows the salmon up toward the spawning-pools at the head of 
the stream, reaching them toward the end of the spawning 
season; and after spawning, the next spring, during its early 
rains, or in winter before, it falls back again over cataract and 
rapid until it gains the estuary, to return to sea, and fatten, 
and enlarge to a veritable salmon. 
Thus the reader may have seen that the fingerling becomes 
the parr, the parr develops scales to cover the bars on its 
sides and becomes a smolt, goes to sea and returns a grilse, 
then returns to sea and comes back a salmon. 
