12 AX ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 



the first college racing boat in this country. Everybody who has been to Minne- 

 tonka Lake, in Minnesota, within the past twenty-five years, knows of Capt. 

 Brooks, a quaint man of rare intelligence, of the Walt Whitman type, with 

 flaxen hair which even now hangs in wavy yellow masses over his shoulders. 

 That's my mate of the callow days, now in his eightieth year ! He went to col- 

 lege, went to sea, went to ranching in Texas, went to Africa and the South Sea 

 Islands, and came back tatooed from head to foot; an ivy wreath of India ink 

 around his neck, a grapevine twined around one leg and a black snake around 

 the other; coats-of-arms on his breasts; female figures on his back where he 

 cannot see them; devices on his arms, and only his face clear of sepia. Crowds 

 used to gather at the lakeside to see him give swimming lessons to both sexes 

 and admire his epidermic embroidery, for he wore merely a "trunk" on the 

 occasion. 



There was good quail and rabbit shooting in the hills around New Haven 

 in the forties, and I managed to put up a good many birds without a dog. At 

 ten years of age I potted three quail out of a covey in a ryefield near my father's 

 house on Oyster Point. This was my maiden shot. Ike Bush was an occasional 

 companion. We had been hunting back of East Rock one day without starting 

 a feather, when just before we reached the brow of the cliff, I raised my hand 

 in' admiration of the marvelous harbor panorama in front, when a bevy of twenty 

 or more birds whirred up from under cur very feet ! Ike went into ecstasies 

 over the scenery, and I collapsed. He went into business at Norfolk, Va., before 

 the war, served gallantly for four years in the Confederate army, and died in 

 Suffolk four years ago at the age of seventy-three. 



During those boyhood years we attended Uncle Amos Smith's school, near by 

 a dingle where there was a noble hardback grove, and a clear spring with water- 

 cresses and frogs. It fed a salt water creek, where we dipped killies for fish- 

 bait ; and there we used to run bogs in the summer and ice cakes in winter 

 after a tidal overflow, becoming so expert as seldom to make a misstep. This 

 practice made us quick of eye and light of foot, and proved of great service in 

 after years, especially in river work and handling canoes. On one occasion I 

 remember in the Adirondack, in 1871, old Steve Turner, my guide (he was sixty 

 years old then), broke an oar in the Bog River Rapids above Percefield Falls. 

 The trout were among the rocks and we had been picking them out, though the 

 current was too swift to save them all. The falls were just a little below us 

 and 28 feet high, and it would be a bad smash for the boat, and something worse 

 than wet feet for us, to go over. As the crippled boat swung around with the 

 current and swept down stream near to a convenient flat rock. I stepped out 

 lightly, grabbed the boat by the gunwale amidships, and held her until Uncle 

 Steve could clamber out and make her fast. It was not a great trick to do, but 

 let me tell you that a babe in the woods in the same pinch would have got rattled, 

 missed the rock, and trouble would have followed. With a convenient gimlet and 

 two yards of wire I had the oar spliced in a jiffy, and we pulled up happily out of 

 the drink. It was my habit always then and afterwards to carry a kit of small tools 

 with me, which helped me and others less provident out of many a serious diffi- 

 culty in camp or en voyage, wherever and everywhere about the continent. 



My youthful shooting proclivities gave my matter-of-fact father much trouble, 

 but he was sensible enough to humor my bent. So I was taken out of school at 

 twelve years of age and sent to my uncle's farm in the Hampshire hills of North- 

 western Massachusetts for two years and a half, where I became initiated in 



