them with the large gaudy flies which the fishing-tackle-maker recommends.  There are only two successful methods of angling now.  The first of these I tried, and by casting delicately with a tiny brown trout-fly tied on a gossamer strand of gut, captured a pair of fish weighing about three pounds each.  They fought against the spring of the four-ounce rod for nearly half an hour before Ferdinand could slip the net around them.  But there was another and a broader tail still waving disdainfully on the outer edge of the foam.  “And now,” said the gallant Ferdinand, “the turn is to madame, that she should prove her fortune—­attend but a moment, madame, while I seek the sauterelle.”

This was the second method:  the grasshopper was attached to the hook, and casting the line well out across the pool, Ferdinand put the rod into Greygown’s hands.  She stood poised upon a pinnacle of rock, like patience on a monument, waiting for a bite.  It came.  There was a slow, gentle pull at the line, answered by a quick jerk of the rod, and a noble fish flashed into the air.  Four pounds and a half at least!  He leaped again and again, shaking the drops from his silvery sides.  He rushed up the rapids as if he had determined to return to the lake, and down again as if he had changed his plans and determined to go to the Saguenay.  He sulked in the deep water and rubbed his nose against the rocks.  He did his best to treat that treacherous grasshopper as the whale served Jonah.  But Greygown, through all her little screams and shouts of excitement, was steady and sage.  She never gave the fish an inch of slack line; and at last he lay glittering on the rocks, with the black St. Andrew’s crosses clearly marked on his plump sides, and the iridescent spots gleaming on his small, shapely head.  “Une belle!” cried Ferdinand, as he held up the fish in triumph, “and it is madame who has the good fortune.  She understands well to take the large fish—­is it not?” Greygown stepped demurely down from her pinnacle, and as we drifted down the pool in the canoe, under the mellow evening sky, her conversation betrayed not a trace of the pride that a victorious fisherman would have shown.  On the contrary, she insisted that angling was an affair of chance—­which was consoling, though I knew it was not altogether true—­and that the smaller fish were just as pleasant to catch and better to eat, after all.  For a generous rival, commend me to a woman.  And if I must compete, let it be with one who has the grace to dissolve the bitter of defeat in the honey of a mutual self-congratulation.

We had a garden, and our favourite path through it was the portage leading around the falls.  We travelled it very frequently, making an excuse of idle errands to the steamboat-landing on the lake, and sauntering along the trail as if school were out and would never keep again.  It was the season of fruits rather than of flowers.  Nature was reducing the decorations of her table to make room for the banquet.  She offered us berries instead of blossoms.