rod and line, not only for the fun of it, but because I happen to know that Father's never caught one, and I'd like to beat him out on something. It's pretty difficult, though, to get ahead of Dad!"
The professor shook his head with mock gravity.
"That's not a particularly good motive," he said, "and I don't know that I ought to increase any boy's stock of conceit. It is usually quite big enough. But maybe you won't catch anything, and I'll chance it."
"Oh, but I will catch one," Colin declared confidently; "I'm going to try and get one of the hundred-pounders that I've read about."
"You'll have a long sail, then," his host replied, "because fish of that size don't come far south of Alaskan waters. Twenty-five or thirty pounds is as big as you can look for, and even those will give you all the sport you want."
"Very well," Colin responded, a little abashed, "I'll be satisfied."
"It's rather a pity," the professor said, when, after lunch, they had started for the fishing-grounds in a small catboat, "that you haven't had a chance to go up to The Dalles to see the salmon leaping up the falls and the rapids. I
think it's one of the most wonderful sights in the world."
"I've seen the Atlantic salmon jump small falls," Colin said, "but I don't think I ever saw one larger than ten or twelve pounds."
"I have seen hundreds of them fifty to eighty pounds in weight leaping at falls in the smaller Alaskan rivers. I remember seeing twenty or thirty in the air at a time while the water below the falls was boiling with the thousands of fish threshing the water before their leap."