every experienced night-hunter, that by the spectral and uncertain light of the lamp, or torch, a deer, when seen standing in the water, or on the reedy banks, is in appearance magnified to twice its actual dimensions.  To this Smith at last assented, since to deny the proposition, involved the conclusion that he had killed the wrong deer; for the one he shot at, as it stood in the edge of the water, though much smaller than some he had seen, appeared greatly larger than the one he killed.

CHAPTER XV.

HOOKING UP TROUT—­THE LEFT BRANCH—­THE RAPIDS—­A FIGHT WITH A BUCK.

We started down stream in the morning, towards the forks, intending to ascend the left branch to Little Tupper’s Lake.  We reached the forks at three o’clock.  Directly opposite to where the right branch enters, a small cold stream comes in among a cluster of alder bushes on the eastern shore.  At the mouth of this little stream, which one can step across, the trout congregate.  We could see them laying in shoals along the bottom; but the sun shone down bright and warm into the clear water, and not a trout would rise to the fly, or touch a bait.  We wanted some of those trout, and as they refused to be taken in a scientific way and according to art, it was a necessity, for which we were not responsible, which impelled us to a method of capture which, under ordinary circumstances, we should have rejected.  I took off the fly from my line, and fastened upon it half a dozen snells with bare hooks, attached a small sinker, and dropped quietly among them.  A large fellow worked his way lazily above where the hooks lay on the bottom, eying me, as if laughing at my folly in attempting to deceive him, with fly or bait.  I jerked suddenly, and two of the hooks fastened into him near the tail.  That trout was astonished, as were half a dozen or more of his fellows, when they came out of the water tail foremost, struggling with all their might against so vulgar and undignified a manner of leaving their native element.  We got as beautiful a string in this way as one would wish to see, albeit they laughed at our best skill with fly and bait; and the cream of the matter was, that we had our pick of the shoal.

We pitched our tents at the foot of the second rapids, on a high, moss-covered bank.  The roar of the water sounded deep and solemn among the old woods, as it went roaring and tumbling, and struggling through the gorge.  The night winds moaned and sighed among the trees above us, while the night bird’s notes came soothingly from the wilderness around as.