rrent. When the savage northern winter closed down upon the high
valley of the Quahdavic it found difficulty in freezing the swift
current that ran rippling over the bar; and when, at last, the frost
conquered, gripping and clutching through the long, windless nights, it
was to form only a thin armour of transparent, steel-strong ice,
through which, as through the mantle of snow which made haste to cover
it, the light still filtered softly but radiantly at noon, with an
ethereal cobalt tinge.

The bar on which the parent salmon had hollowed their round gravel nest
was far up the Great South Branch of the Quahdavic, not many miles from
the little cold spring lake that was its source. The Great South Branch
was a stream much loved by the salmon, for its deep pools, its fine
gravel spawning-beds, the purity and steady coldness of its current, and
the remoteness which protected it from the visits of greedy poachers. In
all its course there was but one serious obstruction, namely, the Big
Falls, where the stream fell about twelve feet in one pitch, then roared
down for half a mile over a succession of low ledges with deep pools
between. The Falls were such that vigorous fish had no real trouble in
surmounting them. But they inexorably weeded out the weaklings. No
feeble salmon ever got to the top of that straight and thunderous pitch.
Therefore, as the spawning-bars were all above the Falls, it was a fine,
long-finned, clean swimming breed of salmon that was bred in the Great
South Branch.

When the tiny egg in the gravel stirred to life,--as the thousands of
other tiny eggs about it were doing at the same time,--there was no ice
sheet imprisoning the current, which ran singing pleasantly under a soft
spring sun. The deep hollow in the gravel sheltered the moving atoms, so
that they were not swept away by the current streaming over them. But
minute as they were, they speedily gathered a strength altogether
miraculous for their size, as they absorbed the clinging sacs of
egg-substance and assumed the forms of fish, almost microscopic, but
perfect. This advance achieved, they began to venture from behind and
beneath the sheltering pebbles, to dare the urgent stream, and to work
their way shoreward toward shallower waters where the perils which beset
young salmon would be fewer and less insistent.

The egg from which he came having been one of the first to hatch, the
tiny salmon mentioned in the opening paragraph was one of t