brief vacation, whether to hamlet or palace, to lake or river, to forest or sea-shore, to valley or mountain, will enter into every one's calculations as regularly as any other of the necessaries of life. If, as some allege, Americans have degenerated in muscular development and in general physique, it may be attributed to their intense and unceasing application to business, rather than to any thing deteriorating in our climate. It is quite as true of the worker, whether of brain or of muscle, who never gives himself a day's real rest in a score of years, as it is of the wicked, “that he shall not live out half his days." Those who deliberately and from a settled purpose to get gain at any cost, wear themselves out prematurely, are foremost among "the wicked" referred to; and the admonition is for their benefit quite as much as for the epicure or debauchee.

I remember, many years ago, while "lying round loose" for a few days at Lebanon, meeting a friend who accosted me with, "Why, D., what are you doing here? I had not heard you were ailing, and supposed you enjoyed perfect health.” "Yes," I replied, "thanks to a kind Providence, I am never really sick, and to-day I am as free from ailment as a sky-lark from bronchitis." "Well, I am glad to hear it, certainly; but if you are perfectly well, why are you here?" "To keep well, judge." I will never forget the shadow of sadness which

crossed his care-worn countenance as he replied: "Yours is the true philosophy. I have been working very hard for thirty years, and this is my first vacation; and I am here now, not from choice but from necessity. My doctor tells me I have impaired my constitution by over-work, and that my only hope is rest. But I fear I have postponed this rest too long. You and those like you, who will have your recreation whatever becomes of business, are the wisest men. You rest to preserve health and not to regain it. I am seeking what, by my too close application to business, I have prematurely lost; and it is very doubtful whether I shall find what I am seeking." And his fear was prophetic. He died in the midst of his years a man exemplary in all things save in this neglect of himself. And for this he paid the inevitable penalty.

It is a sorry sight to see an over-worked, sallowvisaged, prematurely aged man of business, voluntarily digging his own grave. Yet thousands are doing this, because they will not seek rest until their accumulations will permit them to "retire" to enjoy what they have "made," and when such men do "retire," they find themselves possessed of a fortune and a broken constitution. Who, then, are the wise men? They who work without cessation or intermission until they are compelled to seek lost health, or they who prefer "prevention" to cure?" If to merely "work" was all of life, even

then would it be economy to spend an occasional month in the woods; for here the muscles as well as the brain and the heart find recuperative aliment. The scripture hath it: "He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent not that he always does wrong to his neighbor, but that he too often and most inexcusably does wrong to himself.

But angling is not alone a health-retaining and a health-giving pastime. It is a medicine to the mind as well as to the body; and unlike too many of the pleasures of life, it scatters no seeds from which the nettle of remorse may grow to sting the conscience or drive sunshine from the heart. Like the unclouded friendships of youth, it leaves only joyous memories. Peter did not weep because he took fish with net or angle, but because he did what it has become a proverb no angler can do and have "luck," and if Uncle Toby's hasty speech had been as free from guile as an angler's heart while plying his vocation, no angel's tear need to have fallen to blot out the record. Blessed pastime, whose day never ends, but whose sun casts a perpetual radiance upon the "simple wise man" who, regularly as the return of "the time of the singing of birds," sayeth to himself, "I go a-fishing!"

We thank God, therefore, for these woods, these mountains and these ever-singing waters. They are not only the angler's Elysium, but the great medicine chest of nature.

CHAPTER IV.

RE-STOCKING SALMON WATERS WHAT HAS BEEN

AND WHAT MAY BE.

There's a river in Macedon, and there is also, moreover, a river in Monmouth; it is called Wye at Monmouth, but it is out of my prains what is the name of the other river; but 'tis all one, 'tis so like as my fingers is to my fingers, and there is salmons in both.-[King Henry V., Act 4, sc. 7.

HE longing of twenty years has been gratified. I have had three weeks' salmon fishing in one of the best rivers on the continent; and as many of my readers are quite as fond of angling as I am myself, they will be interested in a brief record of my experience in this highest department of the gentle art.

All the most desirable salmon rivers in the three provinces of Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, are preserved. Not many years since it became alarmingly apparent that this kingly fish was being rapidly exterminated, and that, unless some stringent measures were adopted for its preservation, it would speedily become as scarce as it had heretofore been abundant. The experience of the

past sixty years furnished a melancholy lesson of the danger of neglect. For within that period, every stream, as far south as the river Credit (at the head of lake Ontario) and on both sides of that lake, lake Champlain and the St. Lawrence river down to Quebec, were as prolific in salmon as any of the rivers on the gulf or on the coast of Labrador. I myself remember when canoe-loads of salmon were brought to Toronto from the firstnamed river by the Indians and sold for a penny a pound; and it is within the recollection of the "oldest inhabitants" of Sodus, Oswego, Kingston, Prescott and Plattsburg, when salmon in the rivers in their neighborhood were quite as plenty as salmon trout, white fish or black bass now are. But now, a salmon in any of the waters south of *Montreal is as rare as a Spanish mackerel north of the Highlands in the Hudson.

This depletion has resulted from three causes: 1. The destruction of the fish by net and spear; 2. The establishment of saw-mills and factories; and 3. The erection of dams which prevent the fish from resorting to their natural breeding places. Either of these causes would, in time, perform the work of extermination; but the latter is the most effective and the least excusable, because unnecessary. Avery little attention to the construction of "ladders" to enable the fish to reach