One needs to have known an irrigating ditch when it was a brook, and to have lived by it, to mark the morning and evening tone of its crooning, rising and falling to the excess of snow water; to have watched far across the valley, south to the Eclipse and north to the Twisted Dyke, the shining wall of the village water gate; to see still blue herons stalking the little glinting weirs across the field.

On, down from the lower lakes to the village weirs, the brown and golden disks of helenum have beauty as a sufficient excuse for being.

Hereabouts are some strips of tillage and the headgates that dam up the creek for the village weirs; upstream you catch the growl of the arrastra.

Then I heard a cry, and a loud splash in the water, and for an instant I seemed to struggle with a thousand mill weirs; the instant past, I was taken on board the galley.

Fish are caught in weirs, by the hook, or in seines.

The shores of the lake are shelving, and afford good situations for placing fish-weirs, which are here established on an extensive scale.

These weirs are formed of slips of bamboo, and are to be seen running in every direction to the distance of two or three miles.

At night, when heron and tern were seen roosting on the top of each slat, these weirs presented rather a curious spectacle.

In the neighborhood were several fish-baskets set out to dry, as well as a quantity of fencing for weirs, all made of rattan.

The mouths of all the creeks and inlets were planted with weirs, which the natives had constructed for the purpose of catching fish.

Mr. Roe, on his excursion round the harbour, counted eleven of these weirs on the flats and shoals between the two rivers, one of which was a hundred yards long, and projected forty yards, in a crescent-shape, towards the sea; they were formed by stones placed so close to each other as to prevent the escape, as the tide ebbed, of such fish as had passed over at high water.

Some natives and a dog had very recently been crossing the little creeks that fell into the river, for the impressions of their feet were observed below the high-water mark; the mouths of the creeks were planted with weirs, similar to those in the river at Oyster Harbour.

Every day the increasing water as it descended the weirs made a wilder tumult.

These weirs are a great beauty to the Lot, for they generally form an angle or the arc of a circle, and the river tumbles over the rough blocks like a natural cascade.

There are two weirs, at a level of 6 ft. below the crest, each 82 ft. wide.

But the benches in his shop were for the lusty and valiant young, men who could spend the night drinking, and then at three o'clock in the morning turn out in the rain and dark to pull at the weirs, sing songs, buffet one another among the slippery fish in the boat's bottom, and make loud jokes about the fundamental things, love and birth and death.

Here, with slender bows pushing down stream, the Indian canoes went on their way to trade with the settlers at James Towne; their cargoes varying with the seasonsfish from their weirs in the moon of blossoms, and, in the moon of cohonks, limp furred and feathered things and reed-woven baskets of golden maize.

The Black Abbey at Kilkenny, with its long row of Butler effigies, or the Cathedral of Saint Canice, still perfect, with its soaring round tower beside it, or the mystical seven light window of the Franciscan friary by the Nore, with the old mill-weirs running free to this day.

They were occupied in looking after some weirs, from the size and number of which it would appear that they chiefly live on fish.

Upon this shoal, a considerable portion of which is dry at low-water, extensive bamboo fish-weirs are erected, which seem to be very productive.

They depend mainly for subsistence upon the salmon, which every summer run into these northern rivers in immense numbers to spawn, and are speared, caught in seines, and trapped in weirs by thousands.

Early in July the salmon enter the river in immense numbers from the sea, and are caught by the natives in gill-nets, baskets, seines, weirs, traps, and a dozen other ingenious contrivancescut open, cleaned, and boned by the women, with the greatest skill and celerity, and hung in long rows upon horizontal poles to dry.

Fishing involved not only the catching of fish, but the manufacture of seine nets, sometimes half a mile long, of eel-weirs, lines made of the fibre of the native flax, and of fish-hooks of bone or tough crooked wood barbed with human bone.

"To SIR CHARLES GRAVLEIGH, The Weirs, above Landsmere, Wrentham, Frontenac County, Canada.

It was past three by a tower clock at the gate of the Weirs when I got there.