SILVER TROUT. 
57 
sometimes flat and shallow. They are most numerous within ten feet of the shore, and in not 
more than ten or twelve inches of water. The trout having selected these little cavities, clean 
them out with great care, removing the finer particles of dirt by fanning with their tails, and the 
larger with their mouths; this done, they have a bed which they visit for a successive series of 
years, which will be longer or shorter, as they are more or less disturbed. An old fisherman 
pointed out to me abandoned beds, on which he had in former years taken great numbers. They 
were on the south side of the pond, whence the fish had gradually followed the shore, till year 
before last, when they came up on the extreme south-west shore, where I found them. They 
remain in the deep water about the centre of the pond, during the entire year except the spawn- 
ing season, which commences about the first of October. So precise are they in their time of 
appearing, that this fisherman has for the last six or eight successive years taken fifty or seventy- 
five pounds, on the first day of October, when even the day before he could neither see a trout 
nor get a bite. They failed, however to be thus regular last season. The first four days of 
October were quite warm and rainy, and with almost constant fishing we caught only ten or 
fifteen pounds during that time, and those in water of twenty or twenty-five feet in depth. 
This proximity to the shore, however, showed them to be approaching their beds, and a few 
cold nights brought them up. The unusual mildness of the season, causing too great a differ- 
ence in the temperature between the deep water they inhabit and the shallows on the border, 
may be the cause of their late appearance. But it was no easy matter to make a convert of 
the old fisherman to this doctrine; he held firmly to his old notion, that ‘they had a wonderful 
sight of almanack learning,’ — they had only ‘missed their reckoning.’ Having reached 
their beds they lose almost entirely their natural cautiousness and shyness, and seem wholly 
absorbed in the object of their visit, endea\mring in turn, to reach a bed, which they remain 
upon till their ova are deposited. If frightened by a .sudden or violent motion of one standing 
on the shore, over them as it were, they reluctantly retire a little distance, but almost immediately 
return. The males follow the females closely at this time. They are, I should think about 
in the proportion of one male to four or five females. I was in the habit of disturbing them daily, 
from sunrise till dark; and prevented them to a great extent from remaining quiet long enough 
to spawn ; so they were compelled to come up in the night, in order to go through with their 
labor undisturbed. In the females which I took the day before they began to spawn at night, 
I found the membranes enclosing the mass of ova, ruptured, and a continuous line of single 
ova extending from the mass, through the passage, and stopping directly within the exter- 
nal organs, wliich were very red and much swollen. The spawning season lasts, I think, for 
two or three weeks; after which they retire again to the deep water, where they can be taken 
only in the winter, through the ice. Generally in spawning-time there is no difficulty in taking 
them with a baited hook ; but last season, perhaps owing to their being late, and pressed to the 
performance of their functions, they passed all kinds of bait and hook untouched. In the 
