"The sunlit riffles of the bay. 



September Days at Madison Lake. 



How well do I remember, when a boy 

 studying my geography lesson, pic- 

 turing in my mind's eye the 

 kind of country and the char- 

 acter of hunting and fishing 

 to be found in the great for- 

 ests, lakes and rivers of 

 Minnesota. Geography was 

 always a favorite study with 

 me and specially that per- 

 taining to the lake-land 

 country of the north and the 

 mountainous sections of the 

 west. I wondered if I would ever 

 be fortunate enough to fish and hunt 

 in that sportman's paradise. It was not 

 until I had entered upon the stern duties of life that those boy- 

 hood views were realized, and I was not disappointed in the 

 realization, for some of the happiest days of my life have been 

 passed in this boyhood dreamland. For twenty years I have 

 visited these lakes almost every year, and nearly every month 

 during the year and every season has had its charms. Even the 

 winter, with its cold, its dead and cheerless desolation, has its 

 robe of, chaste white, which, like the fascinations of spring- 

 time, the summer and the autumn, has been the theme of wood- 

 land verse and song. But in gorgeous beauty there is no season 

 so rich as autumn. A calm autumn day in these northern woods, 

 or floating calmly in a boat on the bosom of one of those beau- 

 tiful lakes, with your better half as a companion, is a thing to 

 be thankful for. To see the bright sun floating through the 

 sky of blue, shedding its placid light over the earth when the 

 air is clear, the winds hushed, and the leaves motionless on the 

 trees, then to look along the hillside and mark the bright sun- 

 light and the deep shadows on the autumn-tinted foliage, is a 



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