htful jerk,--and he
found himself dragged forth into the strangling upper air, where he fell
flopping on the dry gravel of the shore.

As he lay gasping and struggling on the hot pebbles, which scorched off
the delicate bloom from his tender skin, a tall shape stooped over him,
and a great hand, its fingers as long as his whole body, picked him up.
He heard a vague reverberation, which was the voice of the tall shape
saying, "A poor little beggar of a salmon,--but not badly hooked! He'll
be none the worse, and perhaps none the wiser!" Then, with what seemed
to him terrible and deadly violence, but what was really the most
careful delicacy that the big hand was capable of, the hook was removed
from his jaw, and he was tossed back into the water. Dizzy and
half-stunned, he turned over on his back, head downward, and for a
moment or two was at the mercy of the current. Then, recovering from the
shock, he righted himself, and swam frantically to the shelter of an
overhanging stone which he knew, where he lay with heaving sides, sore,
aching, and trembling, till little by little his self-possession
returned to him. But ever afterward, since he was by nature somewhat
more wary and alert than his fellows, he viewed floating flies with
suspicion and inspected them cautiously before seizing them in his jaws.

[Illustration: "LEAPING HIGH OUT OF THE POOLS."]

All through the summer and autumn the little parr was kept very busy,
feeding, and dodging his enemies, and playing in the cheerful, shallow
"run" beneath the cedar. When the early autumn rains swelled the
volume of the Great South Branch, he first realized how numerous were
the big salmon in the stream,--fish which had kept carefully clear of
the shallow places wherein he had spent the summer. Though he held
himself well aloof from these big fish,--which never paid him any
attention,--he noticed them playing tempestuously, leaping high out of
the pools, and very busy night and morning on the gravel bars, where
they seemed to be digging with their powerful snouts.

Still later, when, instead of flies and beetles, there fell upon the
darkening surface of the river little pale specks which vanished as he
snatched at them, he grew fiercely and inexplicably discontented. What
he longed for he did not know; but he knew it was nowhere in the waters
about him, neither along the edges of the shore, where now the ice was
forming in crisp fringes. All about him he saw the big salmo