28 AX ANGLER'S KKM IXISCKXCES. 



Tom Havemeyer went down to Cobb's Island after plover, and to Martin Point 

 and Back bay, near Norfolk, after ducks and black and yellow-leg waders. Trout 

 were alive in the Morrisania and Pelhamville ponds and jumped for artificial 

 flies in the muse-be-written Bronx. Dr. Robert T. Morris, who inherits 300 

 acres of his ancestors, writes to me that game and fish can be snared and shot 

 within the metropolis this very day, within seventeen miles of the Grand Central 

 depot. And his graphic pen runs in this wise : 



"About two hundred acres of mv country place in Greenwich and Stamford 

 is to be devoted to experimental nut orchards, and I am mailing to you an article 

 which covers the field of my ambition. The rest of the place is to be kept in 

 forest, for two reasons. One reason is because I love to have the Adirondacks 

 within seventeen miles of Grand Central depot, and the other reason is because 

 the cliffs and swamps forbid agriculture of any sort. There is more than a mile 

 of the Mianus river on my property, and some big trout there. Take the canoe 

 out of the barn and go a-fishing any day you please this spring. You can firid 

 deer tracks in the sand and flush a partridge or quail along the bank. 



"With kindest regards. Yours truly, 



''ROBERT T. MORRIS." 



Dr. Morris is the chief of the advisory board of the Canadian Camp, and Dr. 

 Lenox G. Curtis leads them all. We older members remember well when Andrew 

 Clerk, Jim Conroy, Wm. Mitchell, Dingee Scribner, Chas. F. Orvis, the Pritchards, 

 Welch and Leonard, made the greenheart, ash, lance wood, and split cane rods, for 

 the anglers, and Dr. J. G. Wood, of Poughkeepsie, cast the longest fly line at 

 Watertown, N. Y. Orvis is still living at Manchester, Vt., at 80. 



But my time is speeding. So I remark in an off-hand way that my first 

 twenty years were devoted chiefly to the pursuit of knowledge in and out of 

 school. In my twenty-second year I took my wedding trip with a wife just 

 married, and took her down the St. Lawrence river, where a lurch of the excursion 

 steamboat nearly pitched her into the Lachine rapids when she was looking at the 

 rocks over the side. The notable officer captain Boxer who fought his battleship 

 off from the Pei-Ho forts in China caught her by her clothes and saved her life. 

 This was my first acquaintance in Canada, and it goes on to my reminiscences. 



"The first time I remember to have been with ladies in camp for I had been 

 trained in a rougher school was in 1859, when the Rev. Joseph C. Fletcher, who 

 had been United States Secretary of Legation to Dom Pedro of Brazil, headed a 

 party of thirteen couples, with guides and luxurious camp appointments, made up. 

 at Houlton, Me., in the Aroostook country, and went down to the Grand Lake 

 Stream near Rev. Dr. Bethune's favorite camp at the outlet, to fish for landlocked 

 salmon. It was during the era of hoop skirts, and when the ladies discarded these 

 contraptions upon retiring at night and hung them up in the moonlight at the 

 front of our long, open-faced tilt, they looked like monster spiderwebs. The first 

 woman adept with the gun that I ever knew was a sister of Gurdon' Trumbull. 

 the artist, of Hartford. She was the wife of William C. Prime, and with her 

 noted husband was abroad shooting pigeons on the Egyptian Nile from the deck 

 of a dahabiyeh in 1848. A Swiss lady, the wife of Fayette S. Giles, who was the 

 first president of the Blooming Grove Park Association in 1870-71, together with 

 the wives of other members, used to make up the female contingent at the Park 

 hostelry in those days; but they seemed out of place then in a boys' game. 

 Adirondack Murray encouraged the presence of women in the open woods until it 

 was charged that the whole New York wilderness was littered with parasols and 

 bits of lingerie, the jetsam of ladies 'going in.' 



