mensions. To this Smith at last assented, since to deny the
proposition, involved the conclusion that he had killed the wrong
deer; for the one he shot at, as it stood in the edge of the water,
though much smaller than some he had seen, appeared greatly larger
than the one he killed.

CHAPTER XV.

HOOKING UP TROUT--THE LEFT BRANCH--THE RAPIDS--A FIGHT WITH A BUCK.

We started down stream in the morning, towards the forks, intending to
ascend the left branch to Little Tupper's Lake. We reached the forks
at three o'clock. Directly opposite to where the right branch enters,
a small cold stream comes in among a cluster of alder bushes on the
eastern shore. At the mouth of this little stream, which one can step
across, the trout congregate. We could see them laying in shoals along
the bottom; but the sun shone down bright and warm into the clear
water, and not a trout would rise to the fly, or touch a bait. We
wanted some of those trout, and as they refused to be taken in a
scientific way and according to art, it was a necessity, for which we
were not responsible, which impelled us to a method of capture which,
under ordinary circumstances, we should have rejected. I took off the
fly from my line, and fastened upon it half a dozen snells with bare
hooks, attached a small sinker, and dropped quietly among them. A
large fellow worked his way lazily above where the hooks lay on the
bottom, eying me, as if laughing at my folly in attempting to deceive
him, with fly or bait. I jerked suddenly, and two of the hooks
fastened into him near the tail. That trout was astonished, as were
half a dozen or more of his fellows, when they came out of the water
tail foremost, struggling with all their might against so vulgar and
undignified a manner of leaving their native element. We got as
beautiful a string in this way as one would wish to see, albeit they
laughed at our best skill with fly and bait; and the cream of the
matter was, that we had our pick of the shoal.

We pitched our tents at the foot of the second rapids, on a high,
moss-covered bank. The roar of the water sounded deep and solemn among
the old woods, as it went roaring and tumbling, and struggling through
the gorge. The night winds moaned and sighed among the trees above us,
while the night bird's notes came soothingly from the wilderness
around as.

"What a strange diversity of tastes exists among the people of this
world of ours," said the Doctor, addressin