and the finest house in seven counties, but still he wanted more. He kept
thinking of the gold piled high in Arthur’s cave; so one day he journeyed
back to the Vale of Neath and waited for nightfall.
Then, creeping to the place of the hazel bush, he moved the rock and went
into the cave.
Ah, it was a goodly sight, those thousand warriors slumbering there
beside the treasure heap and a thousand saddled chargers beyond! He would
take all the gold he could carry, and very soon he would come back for
more. But in his greed to increase his wealth he bumped against the bell,
which clanged loudly. The warriors started up, asking if it was day, but
the man was so dazzled by the pile of shining treasure that he did not
have the answer ready. They leaped to their feet, called him a robber,
beat him, and drove him from the cave.
Then what a change! He went limping homeward, to discover that all
his wealth had disappeared and where his great house had stood was a
miserable hut. He was as poor as ever, and unless he could get more gold
out of the cave must go back to cobbling and never again ride in a coach.
But try as he would, he could not find the place where the hazel bush
had grown. Many a journey he made into the Vale of Neath, but never did
he catch a glimpse of the broad, flat stone. He had to spend his days
bending over shoe lasts instead of riding in a coach, and was a cripple
as long as he lived.
THE STORY OF A SALMON
BY DAVID STARR JORDAN
(_Science_)
In the realm of the Northwest Wind, on the boundary line between the dark
fir forests and the sunny plains, there stands a mountain—a great white
cone two miles and a half in perpendicular height. On its lower mile the
dense fir woods cover it with never changing green; on its next half
mile a lighter green of grass and bushes gives place in winter to white;
and on its uppermost mile the snows of the great ice age still linger
in unspotted purity. The people of Washington Territory say that their
mountain is the great “King-pin of the Universe,” which shows that even
in its own country Mount Tacoma is not without honor.
Flowing down from the southwest slope of Mount Tacoma is a cold, clear
river, fed by the melting snows of the mountain. Madly it hastens down
over white cascades and beds of shining sands, through birch woods
and belts of dark firs, to mingle its waters at last with those of
the great Columbia. This river is the Cowlitz; and on its bottom, not
many years ago, there lay half buried in the sand a number of little
orange-colored globules, each about as large as a pea. These were not
much in themselves, but great in their possibilities. In the waters above
them little suckers and chubs and prickly sculpins strained their mouths
to draw these globules from the sand, and vicious-looking crawfishes
picked them up with their blundering hands and examined them with their
telescopic eyes. But one, at least, of the globules escaped their
curiosity, else this story would not be worth telling. The sun shone down
on it through the clear water, and the ripples of the Cowlitz said over
it their incantations, and in it at last awoke a living being. It was a
fish,—a curious little fellow, not half an inch long, with great, staring
eyes, which made almost half his length, and with a body so transparent
that he could not cast a shadow. He was a little salmon, a very little
salmon; but the water was good, and there were flies and worms and little
living creatures in abundance for him to eat, and he soon became a larger
salmon. Then there were many more little salmon with him, some larger
and some smaller, and they all had a merry time. Those who had been born
soonest and had grown largest used to chase the others around and bite
heads and swallow them whole; for, said they, “even young salmon are good
eating.” “Heads I win, tails you lose,” was their motto. Thus, what was
once two small salmon became united into a single larger one, and the
process of “addition, division, and silence” still went on.
By and by, when all the salmon were too large to be swallowed, they began
to grow restless. They saw that the water rushing by seemed to be in a
great hurry to get somewhere, and it was somehow suggested that its hurry
was caused by something good to eat at the other end of its course. Then
they all started down the stream, salmon fashion,—which fashion is to get
into the current, head upstream, and thus to drift backward as the river
sweeps along.
At last they came to where the Cowlitz and the Columbia join, and they
were almost lost for a time; for they could find no shores, and the
bottom and the top of the water were so far apart. Here they saw other
and far larger salmon in the deepest part of the current, turning neither
to the right nor to the left, but swimming right on upstream just as
rapidly as they could. And these great salmon would not stop for them,
and would not lie and float with the current. They had no time to talk,
even in the simple sign language by which fishes express their ideas,
and no time to eat. They had important work before them, and the time
was short. So they went on up the river, keeping their great purposes
to themselves; and our little salmon and his friends from the Cowlitz
drifted down the stream.
By and by the water began to change. It grew denser, and no longer flowed
rapidly along; and twice a day it used to turn about and flow the other
way. Then the shores disappeared, and the water began to have a different
and peculiar flavor,—a flavor which seemed to the salmon much richer and
more inspiring than the glacier water of their native Cowlitz. There
were many curious things to see—crabs with hard shells and savage faces,
but so good when crushed and swallowed! Then there were luscious squid
swimming about; and, to a salmon, squid are like ripe peaches and cream.
There were great companies of delicate sardines and herring, green and
silvery, and it was such fun to chase and capture them! Those who eat
sardines packed in oil by greasy fingers, and herrings dried in the
smoke, can have little idea how satisfying it is to have a meal of them,
plump and sleek and silvery, fresh from the sea.
Thus the salmon chased the herrings about, and had a merry time. Then
they were chased in turn by great sea lions,—swimming monsters with huge
half-human faces, long thin whiskers, and blundering ways. The sea lions
like to bite out the throat of a salmon, with its precious stomach full
of luscious sardines, and then to leave the rest of the fish to shift for
itself. And the seals and the herrings scattered the salmon about, till
at last the hero of our story found himself quite alone, with none of his
own kind near him. But that did not trouble him much, and he went on his
own way, getting his dinner when he was hungry, which was all the time,
and then eating a little between meals for his stomach’s sake.
So it went on for three long years; and at the end of this time our
little fish had grown to be a great, fine salmon of twenty-two pounds’
weight, shining like a new tin pan, and with rows of the loveliest round
black spots on his head and back and tail. One day, as he was swimming
about, idly chasing a big sculpin with a head so thorny that he never was
swallowed by anybody, all of a sudden the salmon noticed a change in the
water around him.
Spring had come again, and the south-lying snowdrifts on the Cascade
Mountains once more felt that the “earth was wheeling sunwards.” The cold
snow waters ran down from the mountains and into the Columbia River, and
made a freshet on the river. The high water went far out into the sea,
and out in the sea our salmon felt it on his gills. He remembered how the
cold water used to feel in the Cowlitz when he was a little fish. In a
blundering, fishy fashion he thought about it; he wondered whether the
little eddy looked as it used to look and whether caddis worms and young
mosquitoes were really as sweet and tender as he used to think they were.
Then he thought some other things; but as the salmon’s mind is located in
the optic lobes of his brain, and ours is in a different place, we cannot
be quite certain what his thoughts really were.
What our salmon did, we know. He did what every grown salmon in the ocean
does when he feels the glacier water once more upon his gills. He became
a changed being. He spurned the blandishment of soft-shelled crabs. The
pleasures of the table and of the chase, heretofore his only delights,
lost their charms for him. He turned his course straight toward the
direction whence the cold water came, and for the rest of his life never
tasted a mouthful of food. He moved on toward the river mouth, at first
playfully, as though he were not really certain whether he meant anything
after all. Afterward, when he struck the full current of the Columbia, he
plunged straight forward with an unflinching determination that had in it
something of the heroic. When he had passed the rough water at the bar,
he was not alone. His old neighbors of the Cowlitz, and many more from
the Clackamas and the Spokane and Des Chutes and Kootanie,—a great army
of salmon,—were with him. In front were thousands pressing on, and behind
them were thousands more, all moved by a common impulse which urged them
up the Columbia.
They were all swimming bravely along where the current was deepest, when
suddenly the foremost felt something tickling like a cobweb about their
noses and under their chins. They changed their course a little to brush
it off and it touched their fins as well. Then they tried to slip down
with the current, and thus leave it behind. But, no! the thing, whatever
it was, although its touch was soft, refused to let go, and held them
like a fetter. The more they struggled, the tighter became its grasp,
and the whole foremost rank of the salmon felt it together; for it was a
great gill net, a quarter of a mile long, stretched squarely across the
mouth of the river.
By and by men came in boats, and hauled up the gill net and the helpless
salmon that had become entangled in it. They threw the fishes into a pile
in the bottom of the boat, and the others saw them no more. We that live
outside the water know better what befalls them, and we can tell the
story which the salmon could not.
All along the banks of the Columbia River, from its mouth to nearly
thirty miles away, there is a succession of large buildings, looking like
great barns or warehouses, built on piles in the river, high enough to
be out of the reach of floods. There are thirty of these buildings, and
they are called “canneries.” Each cannery has about forty boats, and with
each boat are two men and a long gill net. These nets fill the whole
river as with a nest of cobwebs from April to July, and to each cannery
nearly a thousand great salmon are brought every day. These salmon are
thrown in a pile on the floor; and Wing Hop, the big Chinaman, takes
them one after another on the table, and with a great knife dexterously
cuts off the head, the tail, and the fins; then with a sudden thrust he
removes the intestines and the eggs. The body goes into a tank of water;
and the head is dropped into a box on a flatboat, and goes down the river
to be made into salmon oil. Next the body is brought to another table;
and Quong Sang, with a machine like a feed cutter, cuts it into pieces
each just as long as a one-pound can. Then Ah Sam, with a butcher knife,
cuts these pieces into strips just as wide as the can. Next Wan Lee, the
“China boy,” brings down a hundred cans from the loft where the tinners
are making them, and into each can puts a spoonful of salt. It takes just
six salmon to fill a hundred cans. Then twenty Chinamen put the pieces of
meat into the cans, fitting in little strips to make them exactly full.
Ten more solder up the cans, and ten more put the cans into boiling water
till the meat is thoroughly cooked, and five more punch a little hole in
the head of each can to let out the air. Then they solder them up again,
and little girls paste on them bright-colored labels showing merry little
cupids riding the happy salmon up to the cannery door, with Mount Tacoma
and Cape Disappointment in the background; and a legend underneath says
that this is “Booth’s” or “Badollet’s Best,” or “Hume’s,” or “Clark’s,”
or “Kinney’s Superfine Salt Water Salmon.” Then the cans are placed in
cases, forty-eight in a case, and five hundred thousand cases are put up
every year. Great ships come to Astoria, and are loaded with them; and
they carry them away to London and San Francisco and Liverpool and New
York and Sydney and Valparaiso; and the man at the corner grocery sells
them at twenty cents a can.
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.
Far into the night the brothers sat and talked together, talked of
palaces and gliding gondolas, of great lords and ladies, of soldiers
moving in splendid uniforms about the Piazza of St. Mark. They talked of
Carnival time too, of the merry pranks the people played on each other,
of the procession on the water and the presents given to the Doge.
“And sometimes,” Vittorio exclaimed proudly, “they are very splendid.
Sometimes they are of gold and silver, and of silk stuffs brought from
the Indies.”
Leonardo sat silent for a minute. He knew little of present giving, for
in the mountains where he lived there was no money to spend on such
things. But always when he made his mother a garland of flowers on her
birthday, she seemed so happy about it that he thought it must be very
lovely to bestow gifts. So he said softly, “I should like to send a
present to the Doge. It would seem like doing something for Venice. But I
have nothing to give.”
“Wait until you are a man and can be a soldier,” the big brother
answered. “Then you will be doing much.”
The next morning he was up at daybreak. Vittorio had only two days’
leave, which meant that he must start back at noon, and his mother had
promised that Leonardo might go with him to the edge of the village if
he finished his tasks in time. So he milked the goats before there was a
bit of stirring about the hut, and led the geese from their pen to crop
the green grass on the hillside. Then he cut some grass and threw it to
the old horse that was their most prized possession, and by the time his
brother came from the hut he called to him, “I have only to feed the
pigeons yet.”
Vittorio smiled and stood watching as the boy whistled to the birds.
The gentle creatures flew up at Leonardo’s call, and as he scattered
crumbs to them, he thought again of the great carnival at Venice and the
gifts that would be made to the Doge. He wished that he too might join
that throng of givers, but he possessed nothing but his pigeons, and a
bird would seem a very poor present to offer a ruler. But he happened to
think that the schoolmaster had once told him that it is not the cost
or the beauty of an offering that makes it precious, but the good will
of the giver, and that a beggar’s portion may be a lovelier gift than
that of a prince. The schoolmaster was very wise. He could both read and
write, which only a few could do in that day, so anything that he said
must be true; and the memory of the words brought an idea to Leonardo
that made the boy’s eyes dance.
“Vittorio,” he exclaimed suddenly, “I have thought of something.”
Vittorio wondered what excited his brother so.
“Well?” he asked as he walked near.
“Will you take a pair of pigeons back to the city with you?”
“A pair of pigeons,” the soldier repeated. “Why?”
“I want to send a present to the Doge, and I have nothing else,” he
answered. “But the birds are so gentle I am sure he will like them. They
are fine carriers, too.”
Vittorio smiled. Being in the army of the Doge, he was pleased that his
brother showed such loyalty to the master he served. It meant that he
would probably grow up to be a good soldier, and in those days nothing
was considered finer than that. So he answered pleasantly: “Of course I
will, Leonardo, if you are sure you can give up your pets. I will ask my
captain, who knows the Doge well, to take them to him and say that they
are the gift of a mountain boy.”
Leonardo’s eyes sparkled with delight. It seemed a glorious thing that
he too might give with the rich and great; so he selected the handsomest
pair in the covey, birds of a soft gray, with shadings of blue and purple
along their delicate wings, and he and Vittorio made a rude cage in which
to carry them to the city.
Then they walked together to the edge of the village, and Leonardo
watched his brother go along the road that wound down to the low country.
He waved good-by until Vittorio passed from sight, then went back to the
hut, happy in the thought that he was doing something for Venice.
Many months passed. It was September when Vittorio went away, and now the
blossom time had come and hills were bright with touches of summer. All
through that long period Leonardo wondered much about the pigeons, but
no word came from his brother; for letters went only by courier in those
days, and poor folk could not pay for the carrying. But he was sure the
birds had reached the Doge, for Vittorio had promised and a soldier never
broke his word.
Then one day in the autumn, when the brightness on the mountains had
faded to bronze and gray, and squirrels were stocking their houses as
nuts dropped in the woods, Vittorio came back. He looked older and graver
than the year before, and some worrying thing seemed on his mind.
“It is just to say good-by,” he said, as the gray-haired mother stroked
his hands and Leonardo looked at him with loving eyes. “The war has
begun, and we soldiers of Venice must sail away to Candia for the
fighting.”
Leonardo’s eyes grew wide, and tears came into them as he exclaimed, “If
only I were old enough to go with you and help serve our glorious city of
St. Mark!”
The big man laid his hand lovingly on the dark head.
“Never mind, brother,” he said. “You have already done much. I gave your
birds to my captain, who took them to the Doge, and the Doge is proud of
them because they are splendid carriers. So Dandolo, our general, will
take them along with the army to bring back news of the war. And now
good-by. When the fighting is over, I will come again.”
He mounted his horse and rode away, and two pairs of dewy eyes looked
after him as he went.