out after this.

What does he mean?

That under our feet now, if we could see through the muddy water, dozens
of salmon and sea-trout are running up from the sea.

What! up this furious stream?

Yes. What would be death to you is pleasure and play to them. Up they
are going, to spawn in the little brooks among the mountains; and all of
them are the best of food, fattened on the herrings and sprats in the sea
outside, Madam How's free gift, which does not cost man a farthing, save
the expense of nets and rods to catch them.

How can that be?

I will give you a bit of political economy. Suppose a pound of salmon is
worth a shilling; and a pound of beef is worth a shilling likewise.
Before we can eat the beef, it has cost perhaps tenpence to make that
pound of beef out of turnips and grass and oil-cake; and so the country
is only twopence a pound richer for it. But Mr. Salmon has made himself
out of what he eats in the sea, and so has cost nothing; and the shilling
a pound is all clear gain. There--you don't quite understand that piece
of political economy. Indeed, it is only in the last two or three years
that older heads than yours have got to understand it, and have passed
the wise new salmon laws, by which the rivers will be once more as rich
with food as the land is, just as they were hundreds of years ago. But
now, look again at the river. What do you think makes it so yellow and
muddy?

Dirt, of course.

And where does that come from?

Off the mountains?

Yes. Tons on tons of white mud are being carried down past us now; and
where will they go?

Into the sea?

Yes, and sink there in the still water, to make new strata at the bottom;
and perhaps in them, ages hence, some one will find the bones of those
sheep, and of poor Mr. Pig too, fossil--

And the butter firkins too. What fun to find a fossil butter firkin!

But now lift up your eyes to the jagged mountain crests, and their dark
sides all laced with silver streams. Out of every crack and cranny there
aloft, the rain is bringing down dirt, and stones too, which have been
split off by the winter's frosts, deepening every little hollow, and
sharpening every peak, and making the hills more jagged and steep year by
year.

When the ice went away, the hills were all scraped smooth and round by
the glaciers, like the flat rock upon the lawn; and ugly enough they must
have looked, most like great brown buns. But ever since then, Madam How