IN FEATHERS AXD FUR. 289 
When she finds a place to suit her, she digs a little hole in the 
ground on the bottom of the stream, lays her eggs in it, and care- 
fully covers it up. Then she goes back to her home, confident that 
her babies will flourish, have a fair chance for life, and when grown, 
will join her in the ocean. 
Well, Salmon are very nice to eat, as you probably know, and 
the people who lived on the streams liked to catch them of course, 
and as villages grew up on the river, and men built dams, and 
turned sewers into it, the Salmon found she couldn't get up the 
dams, and she didn't like the flavor of the water, if she could, and 
gradually Salmon have been getting scarcer, till men began to fear 
they would disappear altogether. 
So some wise men put their wits to work to make it easy for 
the fish to get up the stream, and the way they took was to build 
ladders at the dams. Salmon will leap up small falls, and a Salmon 
ladder is merely a kind of a flight of steps, over wmich the water 
runs. The fish leaps from one step to another, and so goes up. 
But they had become so scarce that people had not only to 
make ladders, but they had to take care of the eggs of young fish — 
make cradles in fact, where the eggs could be protected from other 
fish, from ducks and other water-fowl, and from all enemies. 
A fish nursery is a curious thing to see. In the first place 
the cradle of the fishlets is called a hatching-box, and is made in 
several ways. 
Perhaps the best is in use at a "fish farm" in Huningue, 
France. It consists of a set of troughs, each one higher than the 
next, into which fresh water constantly flows. 
When Mamma Salmon comes into the streams to arrange her 
nursery, the fish farmer catches her in a net, and gently persuades 
her to trust her eggs to his care. So she leaves them in the place 
he has provided, and the farmer puts her back into the stream, and 
she goes back into the ocean, half scared out of her wits, I dare 
say. 
The eggs are carefully spread out in the cradles I spoke of, and 
left to hatch out. They require some weeks, but shad, which are 
raised in the same way, in our country, hatch out in two or three 
days. 
When the little fellows come out of the egg, they are funny 
looking creatures, less than half an inch long, and not much more 
like a fish than you are. But in two or three months they get to be 
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