glories of that day so that you may be interested?
Again and again did California and I prance down that reach to the
little bay, each with a salmon in tow, and land him in the shallows.
Then Portland took my rod and caught some ten-pounders, and my spoon was
carried away by an unknown leviathan. Each fish, for the merits of the
three that had died so gamely, was hastily hooked on the balance and
flung back. Portland recorded the weight in a pocket-book, for he was
a real-estate man. Each fish fought for all he was worth, and none more
savagely than the smallest, a game little six-pounder. At the end of
six hours we added up the list. Read it. Total: Sixteen fish; aggregate
weight, one hundred and forty pounds. The score in detail runs something
like this--it is only interesting to those concerned: fifteen, eleven
and a half, twelve, ten, nine and three quarters, eight, and so forth;
as I have said, nothing under six pounds, and three ten-pounders.

Very solemnly and thankfully we put up our rods--it was glory enough for
all time--and returned weeping in each other's arms, weeping tears of
pure joy, to that simple, bare-legged family in the packing-case house
by the water-side.

The old farmer recollected days and nights of fierce warfare with the
Indians "way back in the fifties," when every ripple of the Columbia
River and her tributaries hid covert danger. God had dowered him with a
queer, crooked gift of expression and a fierce anxiety for the welfare
of his two little sons--tanned and reserved children, who attended
school daily and spoke good English in a strange tongue.

His wife was an austere woman, who had once been kindly, and perhaps
handsome.

Very many years of toil had taken the elasticity out of step and voice.
She looked for nothing better than everlasting work--the chafing
detail of housework--and then a grave somewhere up the hill among the
blackberries and the pines.

But in her grim way she sympathized with her eldest daughter, a small
and silent maiden of eighteen, who had thoughts very far from the meals
she tended and the pans she scoured.

We stumbled into the household at a crisis, and there was a deal of
downright humanity in that same. A bad, wicked dress-maker had promised
the maiden a dress in time for a to-morrow's rail-way journey, and
though the barefooted Georgy, who stood in very wholesome awe of his
sister, had scoured the woods on a pony in search, that dress never
arrived. S