You thus prevent the strain and snap which must otherwise ensue. This movement of the rod at the right instant, under such circumstances, is the most difficult lesson to learn in the whole art of angling. No incident in the sport is more exciting than these salmon leaps. If you do not then preserve your wits you will most certainly lose your salmon. The lesson I learned in maple pool (of which anon) in this direction, was a lesson which I had to learn sooner or later; but the recollection of it will be a grief forever.

What the long-roll is to the soldier the reelclick is to the angler. It is the call to battle and stirs the blood like the sound of a trumpet.

No salmon ever takes the hook when alarmed. He may come to it with a rush, but with his motion so exactly graduated as to have but little momentum after the lure is reached—like a jumper making for the goal. The result is that on the very instant of striking the reel seldom gives out more than a click or two, unless the angler strikes simultaneously-which most anglers do; whether wisely or not, is a problem yet unsolved by the masters of the art. The moment, however, the fish feels the sting of the hook he shoots off with a rush, causing, by his rapid movement, that whiz and whir-r which, to the angler, is the most thrilling music that ever falls upon his ear. The delib

career.

erate click, click, which succeeds the strike, is the measured prelude to the grand chorus which follows when the astonished fish enters upon his mad These sounds alternate through the protracted struggle; now a single click, as the fish shakes his head in his sulking moments, and now a whiz and whir-r-r, as he rushes and leaps in his desperate efforts to free himself from the stinging barb which holds him. When a determined fish is thus hooked, the same stirring music is repeated a hundred times, until, finally, the poor fellow is only able to give spasmodic tugs, moving the line but the length of a single cog, the reel responding by slow and measured clicks like the tap of a muffled drum beating

"Funeral marches to the grave."

But these death-tugs are full of peril. More fish "tear out" then than at any other moment of the struggle. To prevent such a catastrophe requires the most watchful and delicate manipulation. Safety lies in a cautious easing off of the pressure on the line with every movement of the fish, being careful, however, that no slack is allowed to render his vicious wrench effective and fatal. To see an angler at the moment when a mammoth salmon thus escapes-his rod at the perpendicular, his line dangling loosely in the breeze, his mouth wide open, and his muscles limp as a sea

weed is to see a comical embodiment of disgust, astonishment and despair. His bewailment and self-upbraidings find expression in the unspoken thought: "With a little more care how different 'it might have been.'" All salmon fishers have passed through this experience and understand it. No others can, however graphically described. Did not the poet have this picture in his mind when he wrote:

Then she took up her burden of life again,
Saying only: "It might have been."

God pity them both and pity us all

Who vainly the dreams of our youth recall;
For of all the sad words of tongue or pen,

The saddest are these: " It might have been."

There is but one sound in nature, animate or inanimate, which at all resembles the whir of a reel when in full play the rattling trill of a kingfisher when on the wing. It is a singular coincidence that the music of the best angler known to ornithology finds its most perfect counterpart in that which man finds indispensable to his successful pursuit of a pastime that constitutes its life-long vocation. This bird most abounds on swift-running waters. They are in great numbers on the Cascapedia, and more than once my reel and this feathered angler have joined in a duet, to my great amusement and delight. They were in as perfect accord as if brought into concert pitch by the hand of the same master.

I love such mirth as does not make friends ashamed to look upon one another next morning.-[Sir Izaak Walton.

ALMON fishing is confessedly the highest department in the school of angling. With very rare exceptions, the tact and skill necessary for its successful practice is only acquired by long experience in the minor branches of the art, first, in early youth, with bait, for chub, perch and sunfish; next, in

the transition state, with troll, for bass, pickerel and muscalonge; and lastly, when the mind takes in the exciting realities and poetic possibilities of the art, with fly, in streamlet, river and lake. It is not until after all is attained that is attainable in trout waters that salmon are sighed. for, and only very few who thus sigh are ever able to have their longings gratified. But those whose experience has been limited to bait or troll seldom aspire to anything beyond the pleasant amusement

which these primitive modes of angling afford them. Having never cast a fly they have no conception of the superiority of that mode of angling over all others, and so soon weary of a pastime which, from its sameness and tameness, fails to attract when something more than mere muscular exercise or physical excitement is required to hold its votaries. A gray-haired bait-fisher is very rare, while the passion for fly-casting, whether for trout or salmon, grows by what it feeds upon, and continues a source of the highest pleasure even after the grasshopper becomes a burden. But this is not strange; for there is as much difference between these extremes of the art as there is between the harsh music of a hurdy-gurdy and the divine harmony of the violin.

There is, however, such a similarity between trout and salmon fishing that pleasure can be found in either by the expert in both. And as trout usually abound in salmon waters, they are often fished for as a rest from the heavy work involved in the capture of salmon.

Judge FULLERTON had been familiar with trout streams from his youth up. There are few brooks or rivers where trout "most do congregate," from Maine to New Brunswick, in which he has not "slain his thousands." I was not surprised, therefore, to find him very early hankering after a day's