Sunday was a very peaceful day in our camp.  In the Dominion of Canada, the question “to fish or not to fish” on the first day of the week is not left to the frailty of the individual conscience.  The law on the subject is quite explicit, and says that between six o’clock on Saturday evening and six o’clock on Monday morning all nets shall be taken up and no one shall wet a line.  The Ristigouche Salmon Club has its guardians stationed all along the river, and they are quite as inflexible in seeing that their employers keep this law as the famous sentinel was in refusing to let Napoleon pass without the countersign.  But I do not think that these keen sportsmen regard it as a hardship; they are quite willing that the fish should have “an off day” in every week, and only grumble because some of the net-owners down at the mouth of the river have brought political influence to bear in their favour and obtained exemption from the rule.  For our part, we were nothing loath to hang up our rods, and make the day different from other days.

In the morning we had a service in the cabin of the boat, gathering a little congregation of guardians and boatmen, and people from a solitary farm-house by the river.  They came in pirogues—­long, narrow boats hollowed from the trunk of a tree; the black-eyed, brown-faced girls sitting back to back in the middle of the boat, and the men standing up bending to their poles.  It seemed a picturesque way of travelling, although none too safe.

In the afternoon we sat on deck and looked at the water.  What a charm there is in watching a swift stream!  The eye never wearies of following its curls and eddies, the shadow of the waves dancing over the stones, the strange, crinkling lines of sunlight in the shallows.  There is a sort of fascination in it, lulling and soothing the mind into a quietude which is even pleasanter than sleep, and making it almost possible to do that of which we so often speak, but which we never quite accomplish—­“think about nothing.”  Out on the edge of the pool, we could see five or six huge salmon, moving slowly from side to side, or lying motionless like gray shadows.  There was nothing to break the silence except the thin clear whistle of the white-throated sparrow far back in the woods.  This is almost the only bird-song that one hears on the river, unless you count the metallic “chr-r-r-r” of the kingfisher as a song.

Every now and then one of the salmon in the pool would lazily roll out of water, or spring high into the air and fall back with a heavy splash.  What is it that makes salmon leap?  Is it pain or pleasure?  Do they do it to escape the attack of another fish, or to shake off a parasite that clings to them, or to practise jumping so that they can ascend the falls when they reach them, or simply and solely out of exuberant gladness and joy of living?  Any one of these reasons would be enough to account for it on week-days.  On Sunday I am quite sure they do it for the trial of the fisherman’s faith.