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Every fact which occurs in the bed, on the banks, or in the air over it; the fishes, and their spawning and nests, their manners, their food; the shad-flies which fill the air on a certain evening once a year, and which are snapped at by the fishes so ravenously that many of these die of repletion; the conical heaps of small stones on the river-shallows, one of which heaps will sometimes overfill a cart, these heaps the huge nests of small fishes; the birds which frequent the stream, heron, duck, sheldrake, loon, osprey; the snake, musk-rat, otter, woodchuck, and fox, on the banks; the turtle, frog, hyla, and cricket, which make the banks vocal, were all known to him, and, as it were, townsmen and fellow-creatures; so that he felt an absurdity or violence in any narrative of one of these by itself apart, and still more of its dimensions on an inch-rule, or in the exhibition of its skeleton, or the specimen of a squirrel or a bird in brandy.

As I had by no means satisfied myself on the subject, I felt disappointed that they had so soon finished their operations, and I took up a handful of the gravel where they had been spawning, and examined it with the microscope, to see whether I could discover any ova, and how they were going on, when to my great surprise I found them already hatching and some of them already excluded from the egg.

To begin with Trout: Catch as many as you can conveniently obtain upon the spawning beds, and examine them carefully one by one, to see that the spawn and milt are in a fit state for exclusion; and also to enable you to separate the males from the females.

It is, however, undoubtedly one of the worst of cannibals among sporting fishes, and does not apparently rise freely to the fly when about two years old and older. The spawning season is extended over an even longer period than that of our own brown trout, beginning, in its native country, in October, and sometimes lasting till March.

Jimmy had been up in time to feed the chickens and carry in the milk, but he disappeared shortly after breakfast. Dannie almost blushed as he answered: "He went to take a peep at the river. It's going down fast. When it gets into its regular channel, spawning will be over and the fish will come back to their old places. We figure that the Black Bass will be home to-day."

Little he minded the acid greeting, on his return, of a mere Gashwiler, spawning in his low mind a monstrous suspicion that the dying aunt had never lived. Now he read in his magazines other intimate interviews by other talented young women who had braved the presence of other screen idols of both sexes.

In spawning time they clear a little space close to the water of the inlet, pulling up the young weeds and pushing up the sandy bottom until a hollow, bowl-like nest is prepared.

The breeding of trout and salmon, and the artificial spawning and hatching of ova, are, however, an innovation of our own time. Much has been discovered about the procreation of fish, and in no case have scientists worked so hard and discovered more than in the case of Salmonidæ. Fish culture, particularly trout culture, has become a trade, and a paying one.

A contemporary critic accused Keats of "spawning" new words, of converting verbs into nouns, of forming new verbs, and of making strange use of adjectives and adverbs. Some contemporaries might object to his "torchèd mines," "flawblown sleet," "liegeless air," or even to the "calm-throated" thrush of the immortals.

Kingfishers prey on smaller fish, but are believed to eat almost as many as herons. Kingfishers resort in numbers to trout nurseries, which are as traps for them: and there they are more than decimated. Owls are known to take fish occasionally, and are therefore shot. The greatest loss sustained in fisheries takes place in the spawning season, and again when the fry are about.