allen trees, swinging
round the curves, darting up the still places where the water lay
a-dreaming, and wriggling over shallow bars where it was not half deep
enough to cover him; until at last he reached the old familiar place
where so many generations of brook trout had first seen the light of day
and felt the cold touch of the snow-water.

As before, he and the other males arrived at the nesting grounds some
days in advance of their mates, and spent the intervening time in
scooping hollows in the gravel and quarrelling among themselves. Two or
three times he was driven from a choice location by someone who was
bigger than he, but he always managed in some way to regain it, or else
stole another from a smaller fish; and when the ladies finally appeared
he had a fine large nest in a pleasant situation a little apart from
those of his rivals. But for some reason the first candidates who came
to look at it declined to stay. Perhaps they were not quite ready to
settle down, or perhaps they were merely disposed to insist on the
feminine privilege of changing their minds. But finally there came one
who seemed to be quite satisfied, and with whom the Trout himself had
every reason to be pleased.

She was not a native of the stream, but of one of the hatcheries of the
Michigan Fish Commission; and while he was lying in the gravel she was
one of a vast company inhabiting a number of black wooden troughs that
stood in a large, pleasant room filled with the sound of running water.
Here there were no yearlings nor musk-rats nor saw-bill ducks looking
for fresh eggs, nor any dragons nor star-gazers lying in wait for the
young fry. Instead there were nice, kind men, who kept the hatching
troughs clean and the water at the right temperature, and who gently
stirred up the troutlets with a long goose-feather whenever too many of
them crowded together in one corner, trying to get away from the hateful
light. Under this sort of treatment most of the thirty million babies in
the hatchery lived and thrived. Only a few thousands of them were brook
trout, but among those thousands one of the smartest and most precocious
was the one in whom we are just now most interested. She was always
first into the dark corners, as long as dark corners seemed desirable;
and later, when they began to come up into the light and partake of the
pulverized beef-liver which their attendants offered them, there was no
better swimmer or more voracious feeder th