54 



reader of my scrap book. The Express calls the lish a 

 ''pickerel,'' and the bayou the "dead creek," a name given 

 it since the N. Y. C. & H. R. R. R. tilled in its roadway across 

 it and sto^iped the How which kept its channel deep. To- 

 day it is merely a couple of stagnant arms of the river and 

 not worth the wetting of a school-boy's line. Some ten 

 years ago 1 visited this scene of juvenile angling triumphs 

 in early spring, and where we used to cut down hundreds 

 of bunches of perch-eggs and drop them in the water after 

 a fall of a spring freshet, and before the sun had injured 

 the embryos, we only found two small bunches of eggs to 

 return to the water. 



About three days before hatching the embryo of the 

 perch is not only interesting to the naturalist, but attracts 

 the attention of the casual observer by its motion ; with 

 the regularity of a pendulum the many embryos in a mass 

 move with a succession of beats or jerks that are almost as 

 nuich in unison as the strokes of a drum-corps. 



The percli is a fish that I have derided as a game and a 

 table fish, in years a-gone, but at a dinner given to this 

 Society by the St. Clair Flats Shooting and Fishing Club, 

 of Detroit, at its annual meeting in 1889, they were served 

 in a style that met the approval of the dwellers by the sea, 

 who say that all fresh- water fish taste "muddy." 



On investigation it w£is found that the fish had been 

 skinned before cooking, and as this was a new thing to an 

 old duffer, like the writer, it is possible that some younger 

 "duffers" may not know of the dodge. 



When I came to Long Island, in 1883, at the early age of 

 fifty, it was strange to hear everybody say that " fresh- 

 water fish are muddy." Having seldom eaten any other 

 fish than those of fresh water, and never perceiving a flavor 

 of mud, I marvelled thereat, but, after a year's sojourn and 

 a diet of salt-water fish, a change came o'er the flavor of 

 my piscine palate, and even the aristocratic brook trout 

 tasted muddy — the only exce^Dtion being the whiteflsh 



