All this time our salmon is going up the river, eluding one net as by a miracle, and soon having need of more miracles to escape the rest; passing by Astoria on a fortunate day,—which was Sunday, the day on which no man may fish if he expects to sell what he catches,—till finally he came to where nets were few, and, at last, to where they ceased altogether. But there he found that scarcely any of his companions were with him; for the nets cease when there are no more salmon to be caught in them. So he went on, day and night, where the water was deepest, stopping not to feed or loiter on the way, till at last he came to a wild gorge, where the great river became an angry torrent, rushing wildly over a huge staircase of rocks. But our hero did not falter; and summoning all his forces, he plunged into the Cascades. The current caught him and dashed him against the rocks. A whole row of silvery scales came off and glistened in the water like sparks of fire, and a place on his side became black and red, which for a salmon is the same as being black and blue for other people. His comrades tried to go up with him; and one lost his eye, one his tail, and one had his lower jaw pushed back into his head like the joint of a telescope. Again he tried to surmount the Cascades; and at last he succeeded, and an Indian on the rocks above was waiting to receive him. But the Indian with his spear was less skillful than he was wont to be, and our hero escaped, losing only a part of one of his fins; and with him came one other, and henceforth these two pursued their journey together.
Now a gradual change took place in the looks of our salmon. In the sea he was plump and round and silvery, with delicate teeth in a symmetrical mouth. Now his silvery color disappeared, his skin grew slimy, and the scales sank into it: his back grew black, and his sides turned red,—not a healthy red, but a sort of hectic flush. He grew poor; and his back, formerly as straight as need be, now developed an unpleasant hump at the shoulders. His eyes—like those of all enthusiasts who forsake eating and sleeping for some loftier aim—became dark and sunken. His symmetrical jaws grew longer and longer, and projected from his mouth, giving him a savage and wolfish appearance, quite at variance with his real disposition. For all the desires and ambitions of his nature had become centered into one. We may not know what this one was, but we know that it was a strong one; for it had led him on and on,—past the nets and horrors of Astoria; past the dangerous Cascades, past the spears of Indians; through the terrible flume of the Dalles, where the mighty river is compressed between huge rocks into a channel narrower than a village street; on past the meadows of Umatilla and the wheat fields of Walla Walla; on to where the great Snake River and the Columbia join; on up the Snake River and its eastern branch, till at last he reached the foot of the Bitter Root Mountains in the Territory of Idaho, nearly a thousand miles from the ocean which he had left in April. With him still was the other salmon which had come with him through the Cascades, handsomer and smaller than he, and, like him, growing poor and ragged and tired.
At last, one October afternoon, our finny travelers came together to a little clear brook, with a bottom of fine gravel, over which the water was but a few inches deep. Our fish painfully worked his way to it; for his tail was all frayed out, his muscles were sore, and his skin covered with unsightly blotches. But his sunken eyes saw a ripple in the stream, and under it a bed of little pebbles and sand. So there in the sand he scooped out with his tail a smooth round place, and his companion came and filled it with orange-colored eggs. Then our salmon came back again; and softly covering the eggs, the work of their lives was done, and, in the old salmon fashion, they drifted tail foremost down the stream.
They drifted on together for a night and a day, but they never came to the sea. For the salmon has but one life to live, and it ascends the river but once. The rest lies with its children. And when the April sunshine fell on the globules in the gravel, these were awakened into life. With the early autumn rains, the little fishes were large enough to begin their wanderings. They dropped down the current in the old salmon fashion. And thus they came into the great river and drifted away to the sea.
THE PIGEONS OF VENICE
(History)
In one of the upland valleys of Italy, shut away from the rest of the world by the high, white peaks men call the Dolomites, there lived, about five hundred years ago, a little boy named Leonardo. He dwelt in a tiny hut with his black-eyed peasant mother, fed the pigeons and milked the goats each day, and in the evening, the pleasant summer evening that spread rainbow-colored draperies over the Dolomite peaks, he lay in the shadows under the plum tree, thinking about his brother Vittorio, who was a soldier down in the great city of Venice.
“I wish brother would come home,” he said to his mother one morning as they ate their breakfast of macaroni and mountain bread, “because he always tells such wonderful things about the city. Some day I mean to go there and be a soldier, too.”
His dark eyes gleamed as he spoke, and he sat very straight in his heavy oaken chair, as of course a soldier ought to do.
Everybody knows that wishes do not always come true, but sometimes they do, and when that happens the whole world seems brighter and lovelier than it seemed before. The next afternoon, as Leonardo was turning the goats into their inclosure, he gave a shout so joyous that even Armando the weaver, in his shop at the other end of the village, heard and ran to see what it meant. He soon found out, for he saw Leonardo hurrying toward a man who was moving along the highway. Vittorio, the soldier brother, was coming home, coming back to the mountain village with many a tale of the splendid city beside the Adriatic, and perhaps with a goody that would taste very sweet after the coarse fare of weeks and months.