42 The American Angler 
step, is a great home where men and 
women of culture and taste and means 
do yearly congregate. A great log- 
house of three stories, and accommo- 
dating sixty people, stands in a ten-acre 
clearing. One of the one hundred lakes 
leased by the proprietor—E. M. Cope- 
land—is justin front of the house. Sixty 
boats, including thirty birch-bark ca- 
noes, are ready for guests. A house for 
the guides, one for house servants, ice 
house and barns 
near. 

all of spruce logs—are 
The main house has one grand, 
towering feature, which must leave its 
imprint deep in the memory of every 
one who goes there ; a room forty feet 
long, and thirty wide, with a tremendous 
stone fireplace at the north end, and 
tables and hammocks scattered 
generally. To come inaftera hard day 
with the trout on distant mountain lake, 
and sit before this cavernous fireplace, 
with its great pile of blazing birch logs, 
was worth the journey. 
about 
I have sat in many a fishing camp, 
but I know of none which so perfectly 
suits my notion of the fisherman’s para- 
dise as that grand old smoking room 
and fireplace at Copeland’s. 
With springing step and buoyant hope 
the fisherman takes to the canoes each 
morning, and each night returns to the 
great log house and his old seat by the 
fireplace. Within easy reach are thirty 
or forty lakes, to which the guides pad- 
dle and carry and return each night. 
Breakfast and supper are taken at the 
house, and dinner is taken out every 
day and cooked by the lake which is 
selected for the day’s fishing. One may, 
and we generally did, visit three, four 
or six lakes in a day. Some days we 
went seven and eight miles from the 
camp, making three or four carries each 
way. The lakes are close together, 
with hardly a carry of over a mile and 
a-half ; in fact, it is said, one may go 
from the Nepigon, north of Lake Super- 
ior, to the Atlantic, and the longest 
carry is three miles. 
I need not dwell on the scenery of 
Copeland’s. It is all mountains, with 
lakes from twenty to a quarter of a mile 
across lying between them-—perhaps 
more accurately upon them, for the lakes 
seem to get just as near the tops as pos- 
sible. The forests are everywhere, from 
water’s edge to mountain’s crest, of 
spruce, pine, birch, maple, poplar, ash, 
cedar. 
Drouth cuts little figure here, with 
woods omnipresent, and deep moss cov- 
ering the soil. The waters are dark 
from the moss stains ; and the trout have 
that deep pink, with the bright spots and 
red fins which such waters everywhere 
give. There are no other fish, and the 
trout run as high as five and a-half 
pounds. 
We met at Copeland’s several gentle- 
men and ladies from Montreal, the pro- 
prietor’s wife and accomplished daugh- 
ter, a great steamship agent and wife 
from New York, two gentlemen from 
Syracuse, a party of six from Williams- 
port, Pa., one man from Scranton, Pa., 
and just missed a Boston party. 
Our first day at the lakes was at Lake 
No. 2, a four-mile paddle for the guide, 
while we sat in the canoe trailing our 
flies for trout. Dinner was cooked ata 
brook’s mouth, where great trout jumped 
eagerly for the fly. And such dinners, 
or was it the appetites? Where else do 
salt pork and coffee, bread and potatoes 
taste so good as around a camp-fire in 
the woods? And at night the long ride 
home, with the ladies, as is their daily 
custom, coming down to the landing to 
see the trout laid out on the grass, each 
boat-load laying its envious string be- 
side, with proud fishermen declaring 
