46 MEN I "HAVE FISHED WITH. 



don't spawn on the flats, but among drift stuff; their eggs 

 are separate, and stick fast to what they touch. These 

 strings of perch eggs are not fast to the limbs, but are 

 just hung over 'em with both ends down. I have put lots 

 of 'em back in the water. Maybe it's of no use, for there's 

 plenty of 'em and they ain't o' much account. It's cur'us, 

 though, to watch 'em spawn. I've seen 'em spawn in my 

 nets when I've been watching at night with a lantern. 

 When they are first laid they come out small, and there's 

 nothin' in 'em until the he one goes over 'em, and then 

 they swell up as big a mass as the fish that laid 'em." 



When we came to his net he showed me perch nearly 

 ripe, and stripped a ripe male. I took perch eggs that 

 day in 1867 and hatched them in the State Geological 

 rooms on State street, Albany, by permission of Dr. Hall, 

 the curator, and through my intimacy with this observant 

 field naturalist I became a fishculturist and made it a life 

 work. 



There was a gap of some nine years in my intercourse 

 with Porter, as I spent the years 1854-60 in the West and 

 parts of 1862-65 in the army; but the old man gave me a 

 warm welcome, "For," said he, "I liked you because you 

 took so much interest in all the live things, even if they 

 were no-account things." I never saw him after 1868. 

 He died at his home, which he owned, in 1882, aged 

 seventy-two years. Some of the Albany shooting men 

 thought him an old poacher because he sold much of his 

 game, and they said that he snared partridges (ruffed 

 grouse); and it may be that he did; I can't say; but to me 

 he was a kind friend and instructor of my boyhood in 

 things of interest, if not of usefulness. He was one of 

 those real outdoor observers, and the kind of naturalist 

 with whom the modes of feeding and habits of birds, 

 beasts and fishes take the first place, while of their struc- 



