The females were parted from the males,--they separated them much faster than a farmer could sort rotting apples--and then the females were taken out by the men on their knees and squeezed dry of every egg in them. Occasionally a few drops of milk were pressed from a male into the pan with eggs to fecundate them, which occurred in a few seconds, and the males were thrown back into the pond, the female being put into a separate pond and tenderly cared for. Thus, in about fifteen minutes 50,000 eggs, or about three quarts, were obtained, and this process is carried out every day during the season. The female brook trout only live to be five or six years old, such necessarily rough handling naturally shortening their lives, and the males are turned loose down the stream after about the same age, but the salmon trout attain the age of fifteen or eighteen years. To put an edge to the enjoyment of this visit, that was intense to one interested in all out-of-door sports, Jim took a pan of chopped liver and the instant the meat struck the water in one of the ponds, three thousand yellow bellies made the water foam and boil with their lightning-like flashes. Then he threw some to the big ones, those lazy fifteen and eighteen pounders. They made some troubled waters, too, a thousand of them, four tons of trout flesh all in motion, handsome fellows that would come sailing, mouths wide open, towards the surface and flop their bodies, nearly a yard in length, entirely out of water. Connecticut fishermen, who tramp for miles with cold, soaked feet and return home with a wet back and a hungry stomach, having secured only a few ounces of trout meat, can, perhaps, get a faint idea from this hurried description of what is to be seen here, but they ought to come and see it themselves. Of course, fishing in a hatching pond would lack the zest which men naturally feel in killing a wild thing, but "I have known it done." Those that are turned loose down the stream make very poor eating, for their life diet of liver and lights renders their meat very tasteless. It evidently needs the piquancy of a spider or fly to give a true gamey flavor. Just before reaching Lima, I stopped at Mr. Augustus Metcalf's, to make inquiries about the roads, and his son Willard, being a wheelman, kindly invited me to stay over night. My short visit with them will always be remembered with pleasure.