salmon that you ever saw? Not
a grilse, you understand, but a real salmon, of brightest silver,
hall-marked with St. Andrew's cross.

Now let us sit down for a moment and watch the fish trying to leap up
the falls. There is a clear jump of about ten feet, and above that an
apparently impossible climb of ten feet more up a ladder of twisting
foam. A salmon darts from the boiling water at the bottom of the fall
like an arrow from a bow. He rises in a beautiful curve, fins laid close
to his body and tail quivering; but he has miscalculated his distance.
He is on the downward curve when the water strikes him and tumbles him
back. A bold little fish, not more than eighteen inches long, makes a
jump at the side of the fall, where the water is thin, and is rolled
over and over in the spray. A larger salmon rises close beside us with
a tremendous rush, bumps his nose against a jutting rock, and flops back
into the pool. Now comes a fish who has made his calculations exactly.
He leaves the pool about eight feet from the foot of the fall, rises
swiftly, spreads his fins, and curves his tail as if he were flying,
strikes the water where it is thickest just below the brink, holds on
desperately, and drives himself, with one last wriggle, through the
bending stream, over the edge, and up the first step of the foaming
stairway. He has obeyed the strongest instinct of his nature, and gone
up to make love in the highest fresh water that he can reach.

The smoke of the smudge-fire is sharp and tearful, but a man can learn
to endure a good deal of it when he can look through its rings at such
scenes as these.

V. THE LITTLE FRIENDSHIP-FIRE

There are times and seasons when the angler has no need of any of the
three fires of which we have been talking. He sleeps in a house. His
breakfast and dinner are cooked for him in a kitchen. He is in no great
danger from black-flies or mosquitoes. All he needs now, as he sets out
to spend a day on the Neversink, or the Willowemoc, or the Shepaug,
or the Swiftwater, is a good lunch in his pocket, and a little
friendship-fire to burn pleasantly beside him while he eats his frugal
fare and prolongs his noonday rest.

This form of fire does less work than any other in the world. Yet it is
far from being useless; and I, for one, should be sorry to live without
it. Its only use is to make a visible centre of interest where there are
two or three anglers eating their lunch together, or to sup