At the mouth of the same river, the Columbia, net-fishing for salmon is carried on in a larger way than anywhere else on this continent. In the fisheries and canneries nearly seven thousand men are employed—Swedes, Russians, Norwegians, Finns, Italians, Portuguese, Greeks, and Chinamen, a curious mingling of races. Much of this net-fishing is done at night, the sail boats starting from Astoria toward evening and returning in the morning. Sometimes the capsized boats drift ashore alone, for the breakers where the currents of river and ocean meet frequently swamp them, and each season many men are drowned. Between three and four million dollars’ worth of salmon have been sent from the Columbia in a year. In the North-east a great many salmon are caught in nets at the mouths of the St. Lawrence and other Canadian rivers, many more indeed than anglers would allow if they could control the net-fishing. Most of these salmon are artificially frozen and sent to our Eastern markets, where they now have to compete with Oregon salmon. Spearing salmon is very properly forbidden by law in Canada. I have read an account of an odd method of harpooning salmon, which was practiced on a river in the Inverness district in Scotland. At one spot the river falls in a cascade through a narrow cleft in the rocks. Sitting beside this, the fisherman, who had a line attached to his spear, struck a salmon as it tried to leap up, let go his spear, keeping hold of the line, and then, climbing down to the pool below, drew in the exhausted fish at his leisure. This reminded me of an Indian on the Restigouche, who, I was told, used to throw his short spruce pole into the water after hooking a salmon, and paddle after it in his canoe, until the fish was so wearied by dragging the pole about, that the fisherman could easily land it. Still more curious is Sir Walter Scott’s account in his novel, “Red Gauntlet,” of salmon-spearing on the Solway Frith, an arm of the sea between England and Scotland. He describes a company of horsemen riding over the sands and striking with their spears at the salmon which darted about in the pools, where they had been left by the ebbing tide. This kind of salmon-fishing on horseback must have been very like “pig-sticking” in India. [Illustration: A SALMON RISING TO THE FLY.]