, though possibly trout will never be worth
quite that much there.

All the same, the price had advanced a good deal by next morning, for
the wind had shifted to the northeast and it was bleak and blustery.
Everybody knows the old rhyme about the winds and the fish--how, when
the winds are north or east, the fish bite least, and how, when the
winds are south and west, the fish bite best. There isn't much poetry in
the old rhyme, but it's charged with sterling truth. Just why a
northerly or easterly wind will take away a fish's appetite, I think has
never been explained, or why a southerly and westerly wind will start
him out hunting for food. But it's all as true as scripture. I have seen
trout stop rising with a shifting of the wind to the eastward as
suddenly as if they had been summoned to judgment, and I have seen them
begin after a cold spell almost before the wind had time to get settled
in its new quarter. Of course it had been Del's idea that we could
easily get trout enough for breakfast. That was another mistake--we
couldn't. We couldn't take them from the river, and we couldn't take
them from our bear hunters, for they had gone. We whipped our lines
around in that chill wind, tangled our flies in treetops, endangered our
immortal souls, and went back to the tents at last without a single
thing but our appetites. Then we took turns abusing Del for his
disastrous dicker by which he had paid no less than five dollars and
seventy-five cents a pound too much for butter, New York market
schedule. Our appetites were not especially for trout--only for hearty
food of some kind, and as I have said before, we had reached a place
where fish had become our real staple. The conditions were particularly
hard on Del himself, for he is a hearty man, and next to jars of
marmalade, baskets of trout are his favorite forage.

In fact, we rather lost interest in our camp, and disagreeable as it
was, we decided to drop down the river to Lake Rossignol and cross over
to the mouth of the Liverpool. It was a long six-mile ferriage across
Rossignol and we could devote our waste time to getting over. By the end
of the trip the weather might change.

The Shelburne is rough below Kempton Dam. It goes tearing and foaming in
and out among the black rocks, and there are places where you have to
get out of the canoes and climb over, and the rocks are slippery and
sometimes there is not much to catch hold of. We shot out into the lake
at la