When he leaped I ought to have dropped my point, so that he should not fall on the line, but I did nothing of the sort. I felt much as I once did in the woods of Wisconsin when a dozen deer suddenly jumped up from the long grass all about me, and I forgot that I had a gun in my hands. I had so much line out that, as it happened, no bad consequences followed, and the fish started for another run, at the end of which he made his leap, and coming down he struck my line with his tail, and was gone! Slowly and sadly I wound up my line, and found the gut broken close to the hook, and my beautiful "Fairy" vanished. Then I looped on another insect phenomenon, and went on casting. Rodman, I perceived, was engaged with a salmon on the other bank. Presently I raise and hook another, but he directly shakes out the hook. I move slowly down the pool, casting on each side--which I find is hard work for the back and shoulders--when, just opposite the big rock where Kingfisher raised his second fish yesterday, I feel a pluck at my fly and see a boil in the water. The robber runs away twenty yards and leaps, then turns short round and comes at me, as if to run down the canoe and drown us all. I wind up my line as fast as possible, but, alas! it comes in, yard after yard, so easily that I perceive all connection between the fish and me is at an end. "He got slack line on you," said Peter. By this time it was seven o'clock, and I returned home to breakfast with what appetite I had, a sadder if not a wiser man. Rodman brought in a nine-pound fish, and Kingfisher had three--thirteen, ten and twenty-one pounds. The Colonel had made a successful _debut_ with a fifteen-pound fish. As we sat at breakfast Rodman asked, "How many salmon did you ever kill in a day, Kingfisher?" _Kingfisher._ "I once killed thirty-three in one day: that was in the Mingan, a North Shore river, where the fish are very numerous, but small--not over ten pounds on an average. I knew a man once to kill forty-two in a day there, but he had extra strong tackle, with double and treble gut, and being a big strong fellow he used to drag them out by main force." _The Colonel._ "If he had played his fish as you do here, there would not have been time in the longest day to kill forty-two. You average half an hour to a salmon, which would have taken twenty-one hours for his day's work." _Kingfisher._ "True enough, but those little fellows in the Mingan can be killed in ten or fifteen minutes." _Rodman._ "And what was the longest time you ever spent in killing a salmon?" _Kingfisher._ "Once fishing in the Moisie, where the fish are very large, I hooked a salmon at five in the morning and lost him at six in the evening: he was on for thirteen hours, but he sulked at the bottom most of the time, and I never saw him at all." _Scribe._ "Perhaps it was no fish at all."