PORTER TYLER. 45 



him to the nets many times, even as late as 1868, when he 

 was a man of fifty-eight and I of thirty-five, for he asked 

 me to his house and I became intimate with him from that 

 first trip to the nets. 



"It's a cur'us thing," he said on one of these trips, "to 

 know how the herrin' get past these gill nets that reach 

 from shore to shore and from top to bottom ; but they do. 

 Last night I set my two about one hundred yards above 

 two of Cutty Carson's, and when I got through settin' 

 them there was Lon Crandell settin' his above mine ; but 

 I'll get about as many herrin' as they will, yet I can't see 

 how the fish get past the first net. They don't jump 'em, 

 for I have watched all night to see if they jump the cork- 

 line. As far as that is concerned, I'd just as soon have 

 rny nets in the middle as anywhere else." This is a puz- 

 zle a greater one even than how the shad get up the 

 Hudson past drifting gill nets and staked ones, to be 

 caught by the seiners of the upper river; but these do not 

 reach from bank to bank and from surface to bottom, as 

 the nets in the Popsquinea did. 



He it was who first attracted my attention to the breed- 

 ing habits of fish. We were trolling minnows for pike 

 down this creek; the water had fallen and left strings of 

 perch eggs hanging to the bushes above the water. "Por- 

 ter," said I, for the days were getting long and permitted 

 the occasional use of his proper name, "there must be mil- 

 lions of perch eggs left to die that way every year; I 

 should suppose instinct would teach the fish not to spawn 

 high up during a freshet." 



"Well, a yellow perch is a dull kind of a fish, and don't 

 know as much as a herrin'. When a flood comes and 

 covers all these bottom lands the herrin' go all over them, 

 but the minute the water begins to fall they scoot for the 

 creek and seem to find the ditches leading to it; and they 



