descend rivers, they fall back much of the way tail foremost, although the distance may be over a hundred miles. Even a salmon can be drowned in swiftly running water. Often they make short runs down river, but they quickly wheel about and usually lie with their heads to the current. When they are descending, they are thin and ravenous; but they rapidly gain in plumpness after reaching the sea. In weight the salmon of the Canadian rivers average between twenty and twenty-five pounds. I suppose a season’s catch would hardly average more than twenty pounds, for it would include many grilse of from eight to ten pounds weight, and salmon weighing only five or six pounds more. A thirty-pound salmon is very large, and a forty-pound fish will be talked of throughout the season, although it is said that salmon weighing fifty pounds have been caught in the Restigouche,—one, indeed, was said to weigh fifty-four pounds. The Princess Louise, the daughter of the Queen of England and the wife of the Marquis of Lorne, the former Governor-general of Canada, caught a forty-pound salmon in the Causapscal river, in the province of Quebec, a few years ago. Last summer I employed one of the two canoe-men who were with the Princess at the time, and he had a great deal to say about her skill in handling that salmon. I don’t think he cared much about other members of the royal family, but “The Princess, sir, she was a good un with the rod.” Salmon weighing sixty pounds are taken now and then in Scotch rivers, and a few rivers in England still yield large fish. Sir John Hawkins speaks of a salmon caught in an English river in April, 1789, which was four feet long, three feet around the body, and weighed seventy pounds. There is a story told of a Highlander who hooked a salmon in the River Awe, and played the fish for hours, until night came on without his being able to tire it out. Then, as the fish was sulking quietly at the bottom, he lay down, took the line in his teeth, that any motion might waken him, and went to sleep. The Highlander slept and the salmon sulked until three o’clock in the morning, when some friends of the former came to look for him. With their help he managed to land the fish about daybreak, and it weighed seventy-three pounds. That was certainly a giant, but a salmon weighing eighty-three pounds is reported once to have been sent to the London market. It would be a serious matter for any of ST. NICHOLAS’S readers to make fast to a salmon as large as that. But it will not happen on this side of the ocean. [Illustration: A SALMON POOL.] [Illustration: SHOOTING THE RAPIDS.]