At one house we noticed a curious fragment of domestic economy.  Half a pig was suspended over the chimney, and the smoke of the summer fire was turned to account in curing the winter’s meat.  I guess the children of that family had a peculiar fondness for the parental roof-tree.  We saw them making mud-pies in the road, and imagined that they looked lovingly up at the pendent porker, outlined against the sky,—­a sign of promise, prophetic of bacon.

About noon the road passed beyond the region of habitation into a barren land, where blueberries were the only crop, and partridges took the place of chickens.  Through this rolling gravelly plain, sparsely wooded and glowing with the tall magenta bloom of the fireweed, we drove toward the mountains, until the road went to seed and we could follow it no longer.  Then we took to the water and began to pole our canoes up the River of the Bear.  It was a clear, amber-coloured stream, not more than ten or fifteen yards wide, running swift and strong, over beds of sand and rounded pebbles.  The canoes went wallowing and plunging up the narrow channel, between thick banks of alders, like clumsy sea-monsters.  All the grace with which they move under the strokes of the paddle, in large waters, was gone.  They looked uncouth and predatory, like a pair of seals that I once saw swimming far up the river Ristigouche in chase of fish.  From the bow of each canoe the landing-net stuck out as a symbol of destruction—­after the fashion of the Dutch admiral who nailed a broom to his masthead.  But it would have been impossible to sweep the trout out of that little river by any fair method of angling, for there were millions of them; not large, but lively, and brilliant, and fat; they leaped in every bend of the stream.  We trailed our flies, and made quick casts here and there, as we went along.  It was fishing on the wing.  And when we pitched our tents in a hurry at nightfall on the low shore of Lac Sale, among the bushes where firewood was scarce and there were no sapins for the beds, we were comforted for the poorness of the camp-ground by the excellence of the trout supper.

It was a bitter cold night for August.  There was a skin of ice on the water-pail at daybreak.  We were glad to be up and away for an early start.  The river grew wilder and more difficult.  There were rapids, and ruined dams built by the lumbermen years ago.  At these places the trout were larger, and so plentiful that it was easy to hook two at a cast.  It came on to rain furiously while we were eating our lunch.  But we did not seem to mind it any more than the fish did.  Here and there the river was completely blocked by fallen trees.  The guides called it bouchee, “corked,” and leaped out gayly into the water with their axes to “uncork” it.  We passed through some pretty lakes, unknown to the map-makers, and arrived, before sundown, at the Lake of the Bear, where we were to spend a couple of days.  The lake was