106 MEN I HAVE FISHED WITH. 



sidered big ones, but Captain John Hitchcock, a retired 

 river man, who fished from the steamboat landing almost 

 daily, once caught one of two pounds weight. While we 

 were fishing we saw young shad, perhaps two or three 

 inches long, rising near the boat, apparently after such 

 loose sturgeon eggs as might escape through the netting 

 or were dropped from the boat. With destructive man 

 in addition to all these eaters of sturgeon eggs it is no 

 wonder that "Albany beef" is no longer found in the mar- 

 kets of that city. The great fish held its own for un- 

 counted centuries against all these enemies, the greatest 

 of which was the eel, but man upset the balance that 

 nature had kept and the sturgeon has nearly followed the 

 buffalo, the wild pigeon and other beasts and birds which 

 man has pursued for market, and has not been saved from 

 extinction by artificial propagation, as he has saved the 

 shad and some other fishes. We did not philosophize on 

 these things then. We were boys and life was before us. 

 The future of the sturgeon troubled us as little as the 

 precession of the equinoxes or the differential calculus. 

 Boylike, our mental vision was bounded by the year, and 

 a year was a long time then. It was so long from one 

 Christmas to another. A man of thirty had lived a great 

 while, we thought, and the disrespectful boys of Green- 

 bush prefixed "old" to the name of every man over fifty. 

 This reminiscence is brought up by Ira's questions. 



"Does old Hogeboom let the boys go in swimmin' off 

 the dock now?" 



The man referred to was a justice of the peace, an office 

 which he held for years, but from my earliest recollection 

 I never heard him called anything but "old" Hogeboom. 

 Once my mother expressed surprise that I had returned 

 from a swimming trip in the island creek so soon. 

 "Yes'm," said I, "we on'y just got nicely in when ole 



