slightly
hooked.

I remember one of these shy creatures which led me a pretty dance at the
mouth of Patapedia. He came to the fly just at dusk, rising very softly
and quietly, as if he did not really care for it but only wanted to see
what it was like. He went down at once into deep water, and began the
most dangerous and exasperating of all salmon-tactics, moving around
in slow circles and shaking his head from side to side, with sullen
pertinacity. This is called "jigging," and unless it can be stopped, the
result is fatal.

I could not stop it. That salmon was determined to jig. He knew more
than I did.

The canoe followed him down the pool. He jigged away past all three
of the inlets of the Patapedia, and at last, in the still, deep water
below, after we had laboured with him for half an hour, and brought him
near enough to see that he was immense, he calmly opened his mouth and
the fly came back to me void. That was a sad evening, in which all the
consolations of philosophy were needed.

Sunday was a very peaceful day in our camp. In the Dominion of Canada,
the question "to fish or not to fish" on the first day of the week is
not left to the frailty of the individual conscience. The law on the
subject is quite explicit, and says that between six o'clock on Saturday
evening and six o'clock on Monday morning all nets shall be taken up and
no one shall wet a line. The Ristigouche Salmon Club has its guardians
stationed all along the river, and they are quite as inflexible in
seeing that their employers keep this law as the famous sentinel was
in refusing to let Napoleon pass without the countersign. But I do not
think that these keen sportsmen regard it as a hardship; they are quite
willing that the fish should have "an off day" in every week, and only
grumble because some of the net-owners down at the mouth of the river
have brought political influence to bear in their favour and obtained
exemption from the rule. For our part, we were nothing loath to hang up
our rods, and make the day different from other days.

In the morning we had a service in the cabin of the boat, gathering a
little congregation of guardians and boatmen, and people from a solitary
farm-house by the river. They came in pirogues--long, narrow boats
hollowed from the trunk of a tree; the black-eyed, brown-faced girls
sitting back to back in the middle of the boat, and the men standing
up bending to their poles. It seemed a picturesque way of