Pleasures of Angling with Rod and Reel for Trout and Salmon (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1876. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IV. RE-STOCKING SALMON WATERS WHAT HAS BEEN AND WHAT MAT BE. There's a river in Macedon, and there is also, moreover, a river in Monmouth; it is called Wye at Monmouth, but it is out of my prains what is the name of the other river; but 'tis all one, 'tis so like as my fingers is to my fingers, and there is salmons in both.--King Henry V., Act 4, sc. 7.: HE longing of twenty years has been gratified. I have had three weeks' salmon fishing in one of the best rivers on the continent; and as many of my readers are quite as fond of angling as I am myself, they will be interested in a brief record of my experience in this highest department of the gentle art. All the most desirable salmon rivers in the three provinces of Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, are preserved. Not many years since it became alarmingly apparent that this kingly fish was being rapidly exterminated, and that, unless some stringent measures were adopted for its preservation, it would speedily become as scarce as it had heretofore been abundant. The experience of the past sixty years furnished a melancholy lesson of the danger of neglect. For within that period, every stream, as far south as the river Credit (at the head of lake Ontario) and on both sides of that lake, lake Champlain and the St. Lawrence river down to Quebec, were as prolific in salmon as any of the rivers on the gulf or on the coast of Labrador. I myself remember when canoe-loads of salmon were brought to Toronto from the firstnamed river by the Indians and sold for a penny a pound; and it is within the recollection of the oldest inhabitants of Sodus, Oswego, Kingston, Prescott and Plattsburg, when salmon in the rivers in their neighborhood were quite as plenty as salmon trout, white fish or black bass now ...