CORPORAL HENRY R. NEAVILLE. 185 



black bass if perch could be had, and residence by salt 

 water has intensified this preference. My friend, Pro- 

 fessor Jordan, says the crappie should be called Pomoxys, 

 and in his "Manual of Vertebrates" gives what he thinks 

 the word means in Greek; but I guess the name comes 

 from the Latin Pomum, fruit, for the crappie is, in the 

 argot of the day, "a peach;" a few years ago it would 

 have been "a daisy," and so in the process of evolution 

 the fruit succeeds the flower. Darwin, "thou reasonest 

 well!" 



A tree top was a favorite place to find the crappie and 

 incidentally to lose fish-hooks. We used short rods, cut 

 in the woods, but not over seven feet long, for fishing 

 in the tree tops, and the crappies were flat as a pancake 

 and sometimes a foot long. In a tree top if one of them 

 was allowed a bit of line the angler was lucky if he saved 

 the hook. They fought fairly well, too; of course, not 

 to be compared to the fight of a black bass nor of some 

 perch, but it was sport to take them. We strung the 

 fish through the gills, and hung them in the water to 

 keep alive. Once while pulling in my string to add 

 another it pulled heavily, and a catfish, which looked 

 to weigh ten pounds, came to the surface. It had 

 swallowed one crappie, but let go when it saw us. Soon 

 after this Henry put his hand in the water, and a big cat- 

 fish seized it and tore the skin badly, causing him to 

 make remarks calculated to hurt the feelings of all cat- 

 fish which heard them. 



As my mining partner, Charley Guyon, never ob- 

 jected to having a holiday, it happened that Henry and I 

 fished frequently in the summer, and hunted for ducks, 

 deer and other game in spring and fall. Shortly after 

 Guyon's adventure with the buck Henry and I were fol- 

 lowing deer up the Grant River, and I saw three of them 



