a dead secret. All we know is
this: that eels never reproduce in fresh water; that a certain number
of adults descend the rivers to the sea, irregularly, during the winter
months; and that some of these must presumably spawn with the utmost
circumspection in brackish water or in the deep sea, for in the course
of the summer myriads of young eels, commonly called grigs, and
proverbial for their merriment, ascend the rivers in enormous bodies,
and enter every smaller or larger tributary.

If we know little about the paternity and maternity of eels, we know a
great deal about their childhood and youth, or, to speak more eelishly,
their grigginess and elverhood. The young grigs, when they do make
their appearance, leave us in no doubt at all about their presence or
their reality. They wriggle up weirs, walls, and floodgates; they force
there way bodily through chinks and apertures; they find out every
drain, pipe, or conduit in a given plane rectilinear figure; and when
all other spots have been fully occupied, they take to dry land, like
veritable snakes, and cut straight across country for the nearest lake,
pond, or ornamental waters.

These swarms or migrations are known to farmers as eel-fairs; but the
word ought more properly to be written eel-fares, as the eels then fare
or travel up the streams to their permanent quarters. A great many
eels, however, never migrate seaward at all, and never seem to attain
to years of sexual maturity. They merely bury themselves under stones
in winter, and live and die as celibates in their inland retreats. So
very terrestrial do they become, indeed, that eels have been taken with
rats or field-mice undigested in their stomachs.

The sturgeon is another more or less migratory fish, originally (like
the salmon) of freshwater habits, but now partially marine, which
ascends its parent stream for spawning during the summer season.
Incredible quantities are caught for caviare in the great Russian
rivers. At one point on the Volga, a hundred thousand people collect in
spring for the fishery, and work by relays, day and night continuously,
as long as the sturgeons are going up stream. On some of the
tributaries, when fishing is intermitted for a single day, the
sturgeons have been known to completely fill a river 360 feet wide, so
that the backs of the uppermost fish were pushed out of the water. (I
take this statement, not from the 'Arabian Nights,' as the scoffer
might imagine, but from