APPENDIX. 139 



TROUT-FISHING 



ON 



LONG ISLAND. 



(kindly furnished for this edition of Walton's angler.) 



Long Island has been, for many years, the Utopia of New York sports- 

 men, and still continues, although many of its attractions have been lost, 

 owing to the extinction of several species of game which formerly 

 abounded there, to be the favorite resort of all who can pitch up a heavy 

 gun with accuracy upon a team of wild fowl, or cast a long line lightly 

 for the speckled trout. 



It is with this last branch of sport that I have now to do ; and it is in 

 this precisely that the Long Island sporting has the least deteriorated. 



It is true that the noble heath-fowl, tiie pinnated grouse of North 

 America, crows no more in her scrub oaks, and brush-plains; that his 

 congener the ruffed grouse drums less frequently than of old ; that the 

 incessant and merciless warfare waged on them from sunken batteries, is 

 fast banishing the wild fowl from her bays and inlets ; but, thanks to the 

 enforcement of good and judicious laws, trout-fishing still flourishes and 

 is likely to flourish, so long as grass grows and water runs. 



The natural formation of Long Island is not indeed such, that we 

 should look to it, if strangers to its qualities in this respect, with any 

 high degree of expectation as a mother of trout streams ; and yet it is 

 probably surpassed in this particular by no region in the world. 



It is, as most of our readers of course Avell know, a long, narrow, and, 

 for the most part, sandy strip of land, running nearly from east to west, 

 the eastern end being the bolder and more rocky, between the Sound and 

 the Atlantic Ocean. 



It has no mountains, scarce indeed anything that can be called hills, 

 if you except a line of low irregular elevations running nearly midway 

 its whole length, of altitude little more than sufficing to shed its waters, 

 this way and that, to the Sound and to the ocean. 



With few large streams, no river worthy of the name, and scarcely 



