perched in a row upon a rail or the dead bough of a tree; and the swift has taken his departure. That beautiful phenomenon, the white fog, is again beheld rolling its snowy billows along the valleys; the dark tops of trees emerging from it as from a flood.

W. HOWITT.

RUTH.

SHE stood breast-high amid the corn,
Clasped by the golden light of morn,
Like the sweetheart of the sun,
Who many a glowing kiss had won.

On her cheek an autumn flush,
Deeply ripened; such a blush
In the midst of brown was born,
Like red poppies grown with corn.

Round her eyes her tresses fell,
Which were blackest none could tell,
But long lashes veiled a light
That had else been all too bright.

And her hat, with shady brim,
Made her tressy forehead dim ;-
Thus she stood among the stooks,
Praising God with sweetest looks.

Sure, I said, Heaven did not mean
Where I reap thou shouldst but glean,
Lay thy sheaf adown and come,
Share my harvest and my home.

T. HOOD.

A FIGHT WITH A SALMON.

HERE we are at the river; we have passed two salt lagoons surrounded with banks of reeds, which are the haunts in winter of innumerable wildfowl, and even now are dotted over with broods of flappers which have been hatched among the flags. At the top of the farther of these we cross a bridge where the river enters it, for the wind is coming from the other side, and is blowing three-quarters of a gale. We follow the bank for half a mile, where the water is broken and shallow, and the salmon pass through without resting. Then turning the angle of a rock, we come to a pool a quarter of a mile long, terminating in a circular basin eighty yards across, out of which the water plunges through a narrow gorge.

The pool has been cut through a peat bog, and the greater part of it is twenty feet deep. A broad fringe of water-lilies lines the banks, leaving, however, an available space for throwing a fly upon between them. This is the great restingplace of the fish on their way to the lake and the upper river. The water is high, and almost flowing over the bog. The wind catches it fairly, tearing along the surface and sweeping up the crisp waves in white clouds of spray. The party of strangers who had cards to fish were before, but they are on the wrong side, trying vainly to send their flies in the face of the south-wester, which whirls their casting-lines back over their heads. They have caught a peal or two, and one of them reports that he was broken by a tremendous fish at the end of the round pool. Jack directs them to a bend higher up, where they will find a second pool as good as this one, with a more favourable slant of wind, while I put my rod together and turn over the leaves of my fly-book.

Among the marvels of art and nature I know nothing equal to a salmon-fly. It resembles no insect, winged or unwinged, which the fish can have seen. A shrimp, perhaps, is the most like it, if there are degrees in utter dissimilarity. Yet every

river is supposed to have its favourite flies. Size, colour, shape-all are peculiar. Here vain tastes prevail for gold pheasant, and blue and crimson paroquet. There the salmon are as sober as quakers, and will look at nothing but drabs and browns. Nine parts of this are fancy, but there is still a portion of truth in it. Bold hungry fish will take anything in the river; shy fish will undoubtedly rise and splash at a stranger's fly, while they will swallow what is offered them by any one who knows their ways. It may be something in the colour of the water; it may be something in the colour of the banks experience is too uniform to allow the fact itself to be questioned. Under Jack's direction, I select small flies about the size of green drakes, one a sombre grey, with silver twist about him, a claret hackle, a mallard wing, streaked faintly on the lower side with red and blue. The drop-fly is still darker, with purple legs and olive-green wings and body.

We move to the head of the pool and begin to cast in the gravelly shallows, on which the fish lie to feed in a flood, a few yards above the deep water. A white trout or two rise, and presently I am fast in something which excites momentary hopes. The heavy rod bends to the butt. A yard or two of line runs out, but a few seconds show that it is only a large trout which has struck at the fly with his tail, and has been hooked foul. He cannot break me, and I do not care if he escapes, so I bear hard upon him and drag him by main force to the side, where Harper slips the net under his head, and the next moment he is on the bank. Two pounds within an ounce or so, but clean run from the sea, brought up by last night's flood, and without a stain of the bog-water on the pure silver of the scales. He has disturbed the shallow, so we move a few steps down.

There is an alder bush on the opposite side, where the strength of the river is running. It is a long cast. The wind is blowing so hard that I can scarcely keep my footing, and the gusts whirl so unsteadily that I cannot hit the

exact spot where, if there is a salmon in the neighbourhood, he is lying.

The line flies out straight at last, but I have now thrown a few inches too far; my tail fly is in the bush, dangling across an overhanging bough. An impatient movement, a jerk, or a straight pull, and I am ‘hung up,' as the phrase is, and delayed for half an hour at least. Happily there is a lull in the storm. I shake the point of the rod. The vibration runs along the line; the fly drops softly like a leaf upon the water --and as it floats away something turns heavily, and a huge brown back is visible for an instant through a rift in the surface. But the line comes home. He was an old stager, as we could see by his colour, no longer ravenous as when fresh from the salt water. He was either lazy and missed the fly, or it was not entirely to his mind. He was not touched, and we drew back to consider. 'Over him again while he is angry,' is the saying in some rivers, and I have known it to answer when the fish feed greedily. But it will not do here; we must give him time; and we turn again to the fly-book.

When a salmon rises at a small fly as if he meant business, yet fails to take it, the rule is to try another of the same pattern a size larger. This too, however, just now Jack thinks unfavourably of. The salmon is evidently a very large one, and will give us enough to do if we hook him. He therefore, as one precaution, takes off the drop-fly lest it catch in the water-lilies. He next puts the knots of the castingline through a severe trial; replaces an unsound joint with a fresh link of gut, and finally produces out of his hat a 'hook' -he will not call it a fly-of his own dressing. It is like a particoloured father-long-legs, a thing which only some frantic specimen of orchid ever seriously approached, a creature whose wings were two strips of the fringe of a peacock's tail, whose legs descended from blue jay through red to brown, and terminated in a pair of pink trailers two inches long. Jack had found it do, and he believed it would do for me. And go