es, and send
both dry meat and shells to China. They dry the meat of the abalone
also, and use the beautiful shells, which you have no doubt seen, for
carving into curios, or making into jewellery.

A salt-water creature very destructive to shipping and the wharves is
the teredo, or ship-worm. This brown inch-long worm lives in wood
that is always under water, such as the bottoms of ships and the round
piles you see at the wharves. He hollows or bores out winding tunnels
in the wood with the sharp edge of his shell until the piles crumble
to pieces. This small animal would finally destroy the largest wooden
ship if sheets of copper were not put on the sides and keel to protect
it.

When Retta saw Tom's basket of fish she said, "Well, I think the
fresh-water fishes much prettier. I am sure the rainbow and Dolly
Varden trout with their bright-colored spots, which we saw up in the
Truckee River and the mountain lakes last summer, were better to look
at and to eat than these sea monsters." Tom laughed and said, "Oh,
that was because you helped to catch some of those. Do you remember
the big black-spotted trout we saw in Lake Tahoe? And the little
speckled fellows we caught in that clear creek in the redwoods, and
how we wrapped them in wet paper and cooked them at our camp-fire?
I wish we could go up to the McCloud River, though, and see the baby
trout in the fish hatchery there."

So their mother told them that the tiny trout eggs were kept in
troughs with clear, cold water running over them till they hatched
out. Then the little things, not half as long as a pin, were placed in
large tin cans and sent to stock brooks and lakes, and in a year or so
they grew big enough to catch.

The most valuable of our food-fishes is the salmon, a large
silvery-sided salt-water fish that takes fresh-water journeys too.
For they swim up the rivers every year to lay their eggs in the clear,
cold streams, knowing, perhaps, that the salmon-fry, as the young are
called, will have fewer enemies away from the ocean. The salmon go
over a hundred miles up to the McCloud River to spawn, and will jump
or leap up small falls or rapids in their way. Indians spear many of
them, but a number go back to the ocean again. Thousands and thousands
of ocean salmon are caught along the northern coast and taken to
the canneries. There the fish are put into cans and cooked, and when
sealed up are sent all over the world. California salmon is eaten from
Ic