passive state of cooking, if his epigram epitaph," "Soyez tranquille" be true-or was it written for his wife ?-he would murmur amid grateful tears over the experiment, that a sea-trout is either younger than his prime or past it, unless two or two and a half pounds, neither more nor less, offer the judicious epicure the acme of firmness, pinky flake and sapid curd. Their vagrant habits forbid our learning where the greater part of their growth is gained, or what its precise yearly rate of increase is. The way of a ship in the sea, confessed by the wise king one of the four mysteries too hard for him to solve, is a primer's lesson compared with the way of a fish that wanders through sea and river both. Sea-trout are found in both hemispheres in the northern belt of the north temperate zone. Neither to Asia nor to South America are they known to resort. Their geographical distribution seems marked in longitude by the Norway border of Europe and the western coast of our own country. Their range northward is probably limited only by such conditions as exclude the possibility of life. In the late Polar expedition, Dr. Moss succeeded in capturing a small salmonoid inhabiting fresh water lakes as far north as 82° 40. Along the whole coast of Labrador and the Dominion, and up the St. Lawrence River nearly to Quebec, they abound. Nor is saltness of their medium essential to life, so long as they find an opportunity for migration to and from the depths. In Lake Superior and the streams flowing into it on the northern shore they are plentiful at the usual seasons. While in the sea, anadromous fishes are of course lost to observation. But it can hardly be supposed that they rove aimlessly through it, or resort to very great depths or very great distances from its shores. The annual return of many if not all of the survivors of those hatched in a particular river, to the very nooks of the coast and tidal streams where their life as young fry began is undoubted. Extraordinary as so subtle an instinct seems, compared to our senses, with their limited relations to the world about us, it is not more wonderful than that which guides the returning flight of birds, through an element as trackless, to their original nests. The frequent experiments of Scotch experts with marked salmon, and lately those of our own fish commissioners with shad, prove that this recurring and unerring sense of locality is not an old wives' fable, but a true discriminating and impelling heimweh. Even when they "swim into our ken," the study of the ways of fish is perplexing and uncertain. Fur and feather do not elude us as fin does. The naturalist can track a beast to his haunts, and finds him tangible and of the earth. Birds descend from their heights to nest and live within his view. Fish fleet like shadows through their mobile element, and much of the science regarding them must be as shifting and wavering as light in water,—much that goes with their vagrant and invisible existence must always remain within the sphere of conjecture. When, therefore, the return of migratory fish to their home rivers is spoken of, absolute precision as to times and ages is not intended. Some salmon are found in rivers, and the same is probably true of seatrout, in every month of the year, at every stage of growth, both ascending and descending. But there is a general law, that at a fixed period, and for the purpose of spawning, guides the great body of migratory fish up to the head-waters of the tidal streams out of which they originally came. Along the Canadian coast sea-trout begin to press in toward fresh water in the latter part of July. They enter the estuary of the St. Lawrence by myriads upon myriads, sending off detachments north and south as they move on until the main body is scattered into groups, of which those tending to the upper river make their appearance off the Saguenay during the first week in August. In the particular stream of which experience enables us to speak most definitely, their arrival is timed with singular punctuality for the 5th or 6th of August. Often a pool that on one of those days held only a lingering and indifferent salmon or two on their upward run, would become filled during the following night with the vanguard of the advancing body of large sea-trout. In a general way it may be said that the season for the latter begins when that for the former ends, though belated salmon are often intermingled for a time in the same pools with the first comers among the sea-trout. A very backward season, or a dash of cold storm crossing the summer, as it sometimes does in those regions, may delay their approach to the shore for a few days, but not materially. For a time they hover about the outlets of the streams, haunting the reefs and passing out and in with the ebb and flow, seeming to grow gradually accustomed to the fresh water, till a higher tide helps to lift them over the bars and among the rocky passes of the rapids that abound in the smaller rivers. Very good sport may be had for a time in taking them at the mouths of the streams, from the long sand-spits past which some of these empty, or the slippery rocks and jagged reefs barring their discharge. At the distance of a far cast from the shore their back fins show pointing above the surface of the incoming waters whose breadth gives free space for long and vigorous runs. The guides and Indians will tell you-and experience proves them to be quite in the right-that the run of the fish is governed by the moon, and is greatest when she is full or new. At those periods they pursue their way up the stream in larger numbers, simply because the higher tides then prevailing aid them to pass the bars and rapids. Your guide's statement of fact is correct, while he errs, as many a wiser man has done, in attributing the effect to a primary instead of a secondary cause. When once fairly in the current of fresh water, their movement up-stream is very rapid. Passionless and almost sexless as the mode of the nuptials they are on their way to complete may seem to more highly organized beings, they drive with headlong eagerness through torrent and foam, toward the shining reaches and gravely beds far up the river where their ova are to be deposited. The females come first, afterward the males, and the earliest runs of the fish always contain those of the largest size. For several days and nights they continue passing swiftly, seldom lying many hours in the same pool, never taking a backward stroke, then all at once there is a marked break in their streaming by, and the first run has gone on. Another one soon follows, and they persevere successively coming past till late in September, or even into October. All the fish of any one run are of nearly the same weight, and they continue decreasing in size with each successive run, until, as you descend the river, only an occasional straggler over one or one and a half pounds can be caught. On the California coast they, as well as the salmon, are at least a month later in entering the rivers which remain during a great part of the summer too shallow and tepid to afford them a safe abode, until a heavy rain-fall comes. These crowding refluent ranks are but a small proportion of those that quitted their native streams for the sea. Thinned as they are by voracious enemies there, and decimated again in shallower waters by man's destroying devices, the amazing fecundity of migratory fishes barely avails to maintain the annual supply. From some coasts these fish have wholly disappeared. Our own people are more destructive in this respect than any other. They manage these things better in the Dominion. There the importance of the fisheries as an object of commerce and a source of food, yielding for these interests as they did, for instance, in 1875, over ten and a half millions of dollars, has attracted legislative protection, through measures which it would be difficult to apply generally or efficiently in our extended and democratic country. So far as the authority and resources of the fish-commissioners of the different states extend, they are doing useful and honorable work which deserves the widest public recognition and support. In Canada, all salmonbreeding breeding rivers are leased, inspected, guarded and yearly reported upon by a special commissioner in the Department of Marine and Fisheries. Salmon rivers are also sea-trout rivers, and good sea-trout fishing can only be obtained, except in streams too insignificant to be worth preserving, by taking either a lease of a salmon stream, or a license from a lessee to fish one. There is little difficulty in making the latter arrangement, both because the seasons for the two varieties of fish are not concurrent, and because a proprietor is only too glad to be aided in thinning out the sea-trout, which are very destructive to salmon-ova and fry. Along the course of the St. Lawrence between Quebec and the Island of Anticosti, some of the principal affluents on its north shore are the Murray Bay River, the Black, the numerous branches of the grand and far-reaching Saguenay, the two Bergeronnes, great and little, the Escoumaine, the Saut de Mouton, the Port Neuf, the Saut au Cochon, the Laval, the Betsiamite, the Colombier, the River aux Outardes, the Godebout, Trinity River, the Pentecost, the Romaine, the Moisic and the Mingan. Some of these are famous salmon rivers, held on long leases by Canadians or by our own countrymen. A few are obstructed at the outlet or not far above it by dams, affording, however, certain and excellent fishing for a short time at their mouths. Others again do not bear a high reputation as salmon rivers, owing to their having been either neglected or over-fished. One, the Betsia mite, or Bersimis, is reserved for the use of the Indians. It is a fine river, but so cruelly fished, netted, speared and snared by its reckless proprietors that it has almost ceased to rank as a salmon-breeding water. Many of these streams will long remain unvisited except by the most enterprising anglers, on account of their remoteness from the common lines of travel, and the forbidding uninhabited country through which they flow. The easiest access is still by the way of Quebec. As far as the village of Tadousac, at the mouth of the Saguenay, a daily steam-line runs. But sac might well be called the place of rest. Within forty-eight hours from New York one seems transported to one of the ends of the earth. All around it is vast and lonely. The great river stretches glimmering away to a shore seldom faintly seen. Behind, bare lofty crags shut it in, treeless and silent. A huge promontory bars it from the Saguenay, rolling black and cold as if drained from the eternal chasms of polar glaciers. The air comes thin and pure, the light falls sharp on the gray brows of the cliffs, and the brown sand washed up by the bay. Most of those trim cottages dropped 71 here all usual and comfortable ways of Whatever its soft Indian name may mean (if it be not rather Breton), Tadou among the rocks belong to the best people in the province of Quebec, and a few to countrymen of our own, who long ago found out this retreat for cool, economical, northern lotus-eating. Such traces of human life are lost like dots in the great spaces. The silence is broken every hour by a restless little bell, tinkling from the gable of the oldest church on the continent. This is a pocket-chapel, that could be set inside a town drawing-room, low-pitched, mossy and winter-bitten, dark inside with two hundred years' censer-smoke-the homely shrine for the simple faith of a poor and kindly race. salmon-fishers, ready, for the strangers' ben- | and slow to learn anything beyond their efit, with courtesy, information, and news from the streams. Everything indeed about the settlement is salmonoid. A short walk along the sands leads to a cluster of habitans' houses in a corner of the bay. Here, if the angler has taken due care for his arrangements in former years, his guides and skipper welcome him, and his impedimenta for the month's work are gathered. David, Gédéon, Edouard, Pierre Jacques, Fabian, with a dozen children, French and Indian mixture, meet him with hearty greeting. Poor Cyrille is missing. No paddle was more deft than his, no shot for a seal surer. Three years ago, in the St. John's, a treacherous whirlpool boiling up at the foot of a rapid wrenched the canoe out of his grip, and sucked him with it to the bottom. The lot of these habitans is miserably hard and poor. The stony soil grudges a little grass, or a handful of oats and potatoes. They make the rivers their farm, shooting seals VOL. XIV.-3. range of habit. Part of them are of mixed Then MARKET LANDING STAIRS, QUEBEC. a hold for ballast and cargo, forward a cabin built for dwarfs but holding berths, seats, and a table, and astern a clear space for handling sheets and helm, large enough for enjoyment of the evening pipe and the morning douche. All at last overhauled and stowed, the canoes triced up outside the shrouds and the special case sorted of stores for the cruise, which may last no one knows how long, we wait for a gentle south-west and the first of the ebb. great Laurentian range, whose ironbound off-shoots frown down over the whole lower course of the river, retreating at points for a few miles, and opening everywhere among their recesses great breadths of a clayey soil, dotted with lakes, and channeled by rapid rivers. Some of these are fed by large sheets of water, and follow a course of over a hundred miles, while others run for less than a third that distance. Long sandy capes jut into the river, and rocky islets fringe it, but for many unbroken leagues of its flow it laps the feet of the savage gray crags or chafes round granite blocks banded with red and purple. A fisherman's house under a cliff, a cluster of huts or a light-house where a stream pours in, and a single great saw-mill and lumber depot are the only inhabited spots along hundreds of miles in its course. The voyager making a port from curiosity or stress of weather gains a hearty welcome, giving in exchange his week-old news, fresh and strange to his hosts. The immense expanse of the river, notwithstanding the steady commerce traversing it, is lonely as the seaand often days pass without meeting a sail. With a fresh south-west breeze such as often prevails in August, the run has been made from Tadousac to the destination within twelve hours. Oftener, sailing with the mornOpposite Tadousac the St. Lawrence has ing ebb at nine, the afternoon of the next a breadth of over twenty miles. Here the day has seen us at camp. One melancholy Saguenay, storming in, conquers the greater diary records four nights spent aboard with flood, as the Missouri does the Mississippi, alternations of thick fog and baffling northand deepens the grandeur and wildness of easter; our vessel after a tossing struggle of its scenery. The southern bank is as pict- endless and hopeless tacks, turning tail to uresque and less rugged, but along the the blast each evening and bounding back widening water we hug the northern shore, for miles into some sheltered cove under seldom stretching across far enough to see the cliffs; and five days wasted in premathe outlines of the other break into distinct turely using up the stock of novels, counting masses. Only below its junction with the wild ducks cutting the mist, listening for Saguenay can the imperial character of this the blow of the grampus-like escape steam majestic river be felt. Crossing half a con--gibors, the natives call him-and watchtinent to meet the sea half way, it spreads like a sea itself, and tosses dangerous waves under a sudden gale. On the north it washes the base of spurs sent out by the ing the graceful roll of the white porpoises. After making the mouth of the stream, a favoring tide must be waited for, to carry our craft a couple of miles up its wind |