pest, when
suddenly the foremost felt something tickling like a cobweb about their
noses and under their chins. They changed their course a little to brush
it off, and it touched their fins as well. Then they tried to slip down
with the current, and thus leave it behind. But, no! the thing, whatever
it was, although its touch was soft, refused to let go, and held them
like a fetter. The more they struggled, the tighter became its grasp,
and the whole foremost rank of the salmon felt it together; for it was a
great gill-net, a quarter of a mile long, stretched squarely across the
mouth of the river.

By-and-by men came in boats, and hauled up the gill-net and the helpless
salmon that had become entangled in it. They threw the fishes into a
pile in the bottom of the boat, and the others saw them no more. We that
live outside the water know better what befalls them, and we can tell
the story which the salmon could not.

All along the banks of the Columbia River, from its mouth to nearly
thirty miles away, there is a succession of large buildings, looking
like great barns or warehouses, built on piles in the river, high enough
to be out of the reach of floods. There are thirty of these buildings,
and they are called canneries. Each cannery has about forty boats, and
with each boat are two men and a long gill-net. These nets fill the
whole river as with a nest of cobwebs from April to July, and to each
cannery nearly a thousand great salmon are brought every day. These
salmon are thrown in a pile on the floor; and Wing Hop, the big
Chinaman, takes them one after another on the table, and with a great
knife dexterously cuts off the head, the tail, and the fins; then with a
sudden thrust he removes the intestines and the eggs. The body goes into
a tank of water; and the head is dropped into a box on a flat-boat, and
goes down the river to be made into salmon oil. Next, the body is
brought to another table; and Quong Sang, with a machine like a
feed-cutter, cuts it into pieces each just as long as a one-pound can.
Then Ah Sam, with a butcher-knife, cuts these pieces into strips just as
wide as the can. Next Wan Lee, the "China boy," brings down a hundred
cans from the loft where the tinners are making them, and into each puts
a spoonful of salt. It takes just six salmon to fill a hundred cans.
Then twenty Chinamen put the pieces of meat into the cans, fitting in
little strips to make them exactly full. Ten more solder up the c