AX(iLl.\<; DAYS AM) A.\(,L1X(, YYR1TKRS. 11 



One learns his salt water lessons early who is reared beside the bright waves 

 of Long Island Sound. Given a good centerboard lapstreak boat and unrestricted 

 personal liberty, in off hours of boyhood, and there is no better kindergarten for 

 the angler than its broad expanse and the tideways of its indented shores; and 

 inasmuch as the greater part of my tuition was acquired at Brooks & Thatcher's 

 boathouse with the hopeful son of the senior partner as my inseparable com- 

 panion unless I chanced to take up with Charles F. Hotchkiss or George H. 

 Townsend, of East Haven, who were much older men we two, John and I, soon 

 learned the caprices of that changeful Mediterranean and all its belongings, and 

 how to shape the "Teazer's" course accordingly. And John is living yet at 

 Minnetonka. We knew every rock, ledge and reef, and every spit, spar-buoy and 

 spindle from Charles Island to New London. 



We made the acquaintance of the light-keepers at Marvin's Point and Faulk- 

 ner's Island, and were solid with the hotel-keepers at Branford Point, Double 

 Beach, Stony Creek, Thimble Islands, and Savin Rock. Sam Upson, Malachi 



IIAI.LOCK C'ASTI.K. 



King, and the rest. Once on a July day we made for the land in time to avoid 

 a thunder, squall which was coming up in a threatening manner. There were 

 quite a few sailing craft in the offing. Being less prudent than we, several were 

 capsized, and the "Teazer" ran out ?.nd picked three men, who were strangers, 

 off the bottom of a yacht that had turned turtle. Some fifteen years afterwards 

 I happened to be in Savannah, Ga., and was telling the incident to Fred Sims, 

 of the Morning News, when he exclaimed, "I was one of those three men!" 



Charles F. Hotchkiss was a forty-niner, and I saw him start that year in 

 the brig, Gen. Armstrong, from the end of The Pier at New Haven, for the long 

 voyage around Cape Horn to San Francisco. There he set up in a tent one of 

 the hob-nailed iron safes used in those days, and that was the first bank of de- 

 posit in California. George Townsend was a man of wealth and owned a fine 

 yacht. Brooks & Thatcher built for the Undine Club of Yale College, in 1851, 



