ans,
and ten more put the cans into boiling water till the meat is thoroughly
cooked, and five more punch a little hole in the head of each can to let
out the air. Then they solder them up again, and little girls paste on
them bright-colored labels showing merry little cupids riding the happy
salmon up to the cannery door, with Mount Tacoma and Cape Disappointment
in the background; and a legend underneath says that this is "Booth's,"
or "Badollet's Best," or "Hume's," or "Clark's," or "Kinney's Superfine
Salt Water Salmon." Then the cans are placed in cases, forty-eight in a
case, and five hundred thousand cases are put up every year. Great ships
come to Astoria, and are loaded with them; and they carry them away to
London and San Francisco and Liverpool and New York and Sidney and
Valparaiso; and the man at the corner grocery sells them at twenty cents
a can.

All this time our salmon is going up the river, eluding one net as by a
miracle, and soon having need of more miracles to escape the rest;
passing by Astoria on a fortunate day,--which was Sunday, the day on
which no man may fish if he expects to sell what he catches,--till
finally he came to where nets were few, and, at last, to where they
ceased altogether. But there he found that scarcely any of his many
companies were with him; for the nets cease when there are no more
salmon to be caught in them. So he went on, day and night, where the
water was deepest, stopping not to feed or loiter on the way, till at
last he came to a wild gorge, where the great river became an angry
torrent, rushing wildly over a huge staircase of rocks. But our hero did
not falter; and summoning all his forces, he plunged into the Cascades.
The current caught him and dashed him against the rocks. A whole row of
silvery scales came off and glistened in the water like sparks of fire,
and a place on his side became black-and-red, which, for a salmon, is
the same as being black-and-blue for other people. His comrades tried to
go up with him; and one lost his eye, one his tail, and one had his
lower jaw pushed back into his head like the joint of a telescope. Again
he tried to surmount the Cascades; and at last he succeeded, and an
Indian on the rocks above was waiting to receive him. But the Indian
with his spear was less skillful than he was wont to be, and our hero
escaped, losing only a part of one of his fins; and with him came one
other, and henceforth these two pursued their journey