to this amusement; so much so that when
the Bishop of Durham inquired of him when one of his most important
works would be finished, he said, with great simplicity and good humour,
'My Lord, I shall work steadily at it when the fly-fishing season is
over.'--SIR HUMPHRY DAVY: Salmonia.

The boundary line between the Province of Quebec and New Brunswick, for
a considerable part of its course, resembles the name of the poet
Keats; it is "writ in water." But like his fame, it is water that never
fails,--the limpid current of the river Ristigouche.

The railway crawls over it on a long bridge at Metapedia, and you are
dropped in the darkness somewhere between midnight and dawn. When you
open your window-shutters the next morning, you see that the village
is a disconsolate hamlet, scattered along the track as if it had been
shaken by chance from an open freight-car; it consists of twenty houses,
three shops, and a discouraged church perched upon a little hillock
like a solitary mourner on the anxious seat. The one comfortable and
prosperous feature in the countenance of Metapedia is the house of the
Ristigouche Salmon Club--an old-fashioned mansion, with broad, white
piazza, looking over rich meadow-lands. Here it was that I found my
friend Favonius, president of solemn societies, pillar of church and
state, ingenuously arrayed in gray knickerbockers, a flannel shirt, and
a soft hat, waiting to take me on his horse-yacht for a voyage up the
river.

Have you ever seen a horse-yacht? Sometimes it is called a scow; but
that sounds common. Sometimes it is called a house-boat; but that is too
English. What does it profit a man to have a whole dictionary full of
language at his service, unless he can invent a new and suggestive name
for his friend's pleasure-craft? The foundation of the horse-yacht--if
a thing that floats may be called fundamental--is a flat-bottomed boat,
some fifty feet long and ten feet wide, with a draft of about eight
inches. The deck is open for fifteen feet aft of the place where the
bowsprit ought to be; behind that it is completely covered by a house,
cabin, cottage, or whatever you choose to call it, with straight sides
and a peaked roof of a very early Gothic pattern. Looking in at the door
you see, first of all, two cots, one on either side of the passage; then
an open space with a dining-table, a stove, and some chairs; beyond that
a pantry with shelves, and a great chest for provisions. A door at