eges of this age of enterprise.

On my way south I broke the journey to spend a couple of days upon
another river, but only added a few sea trout to my achievements. The
salmon were plentiful enough, but they were waiting, sullenly yet
restlessly, for a rise of water, and I left the two anglers, owners of
the river, who were living in a snug Norwegian home of their own,
waiting, too, with patient resignation. There they were amongst the
fishing tackle, guns, cartridge cases, dogs, and miscellaneous
paraphernalia essential to noble sportsmen who, poor fellows, in these
hard times, can only spend a few months every year with a lovely fiord
under their noses, and a few hundredweights of salmon, and odds and
ends of reindeer, blackcock, and ryper now and then to engage their
attention. I wonder no more that English sportsmen go a little mad
about their beloved Norway; and that hard-working judges, bishops,
university dons, and professional men of all sorts and conditions, find
their best balm of Gilead amongst its picturesque valleys and hills.
Of course the sportsmen are not always happy. If in the smoking-room
on our homeward passage A. was able to remark that he had finished up,
two days previously, with a 30-lb. salmon, and B. stated the heavy
totals on a few favoured rivers, there were C. and D. to bemoan
deplorable blanks, and tell of anglers who had gone home disgusted
before their term of tenure expired; indeed, one fellow passenger
whispered me near the smoke stack that a gentleman of his acquaintance
had paid close upon 400 pounds for a river that yielded him just thirty
fish for the entire season.

CHAPTER XVIII

GLIMPSES OF CANADA, ETC.

Perhaps I may be allowed to say that my visits to both Canada and the
States were on journalistic work which gave little time for play of any
sort, and I half fear that I only introduce these scraps of fishing
matter to get an excuse for re-telling my own story of how I caught a
big "'lunge" in Canada, in the early autumn of 1897. In the Natural
History books of the Province of Ontario the designation is Maskinonge.
The word is often made mascalonge, or muscalunge, and, it being less
labour to pronounce one than four syllables, people in many districts
where the fish is caught, for short call it "'lunge." As offering a
minimum strain upon the pen, in this form I will refer to it in the
course of my chronicle of how I caught my sample. The fish is, in a
word, th