But there is nothing lazy about the salmon when once he is hooked. If there is a twenty-five pound salmon at the end of your line, jumping nearly as high as your head in his struggles to rid himself of the hook, you will be sure to think of nothing except that fish. [Illustration: SALMON FLIES.] But before the salmon reaches a weight of twenty-five pounds, he appears in so many and so different forms that very wise men have been unable to recognize him. When the salmon is just hatched, he is known as fry, or fingerling. Then he becomes a parr, or samlet, also called pink, or brandling, on some foreign rivers. The parr changes to a smolt, the smolt to a grilse, and the grilse finally develops into the salmon. The latter, when running fresh from the sea, are called white salmon, and when they are descending rivers after spawning, they are termed kelts, or black salmon. Other names given to salmon after spawning-time are kippers and baggits, or shedders. So the salmon, like the royal fish that he is, has as many names as a prince of one of the royal families of Europe. The alevin, or baby salmon, is hatched in from thirty to one hundred days after the eggs are laid in furrows in gravelly beds which are scooped out by the parent fish, near the head-waters of cold, clear rivers. Presently the alevin grows into the fry, or pink, which is an absurd little fish about an inch long, goggle-eyed, and with dark bars on its sides. When some three months old, the fry makes a change like that of a chrysalis into a butterfly. It becomes a shapely little fish with a forked tail, and brilliant carmine spots shine out on its sides. Its back is of a dark slaty color, and the bars are less strongly marked as the parr grows older. The greediest of trout is not more hungry and active. I have often seen a dozen tiny parr jump from the water at my flies. Once, when coming down the Restigouche in a canoe, with our rods laid aside, and the flies dangling just over the water, two parr leaped together and hooked themselves, although they were hardly four inches long. These pretty little fishes, which one might readily mistake for trout, were once supposed to belong to a species entirely distinct from the salmon. Naturalists were also puzzled by finding that some parr remain for nearly three years in fresh water. So they concluded that these latter parr never went to sea at all, and considered them a species by themselves, which they called _Salmo samulus_. But nature was finally seen to be wiser than the naturalists. Nature has decreed that only half the parr hatched in a given winter shall go down to the sea at one time, and in this way protects the race from the chance of wholesale destruction. So we are now told that some of the parr develop more rapidly than others, and migrate to the sea in their second spring, while others remain in the river a year longer, and some for still another year. [Illustration: A FISH-LADDER AROUND A DAM.]