THIRTEENTH ANNUAL MEETING. 59 
sort for devotees of boating and angling, and where pretty cot- 
tage residences may be built for family homes at but trifling cost, 
and where easy access to telegraph and railroad would render 
their occupants scarcely conscious of absence from city comforts. 
Cobosseecontee, Snow and Belgrade lakes are places of marked 
beauty and healthfulness, easy of access and where facilities for 
boating and angling are unsurpassed. Homes for hundreds 
whose lives are dependent upon country air and exercise can be 
made in cottage and tent, while the expense of the more fash- 
ionable places of resort bars them from all but those of large 
means. We often wonder that our city residents do not appre- 
ciate at how small a cost a pretty summer cottage can be built 
upon the shore of any of these beautiful lakes, abounding in 
fish, with health and exercise, and freedom from all the cares of 
city life.” 
In a letter dated Dixfield, Me., April 27th, 1884, Mr. Stanley 
writes: “ Yours of the 24th received. With regard to black bass, 
I know we have them here in great abundance, the number of 
ponds we have stocked (all pickerel ponds) I think will reach to 
the hundreds. Wherever you put half a dozen, they are sure to 
take and will be heard from in two orthree years. I havetaken 
bass of two and one-half pounds in a pond that had only been 
stocked two years, and with young fry, so they could not be over 
two and one-half years old. There has been a great demand for 
them in our State, and in many ponds there is good bass fishing 
where there was none whatever before. I think they are a fish 
that cannot be thinned out by fishing with hook and line. I~ 
have met with the best success with the fly, from dusk till ten 
at night, fishing close in shore in'very shoal water, have caught 
large fish when it was so dark I could not tell, casting from a 
boat, whether my fly struck on shore or in the water, and only 
knew I struck a fish by feeling the tug or hearing the splash. 
The Winthrop ponds, Cobosseecontee, one of the ponds you 
stocked, Lake Maranocook and in all that chain of lakes, is 
good. I have taken in one afternoon in Cobosseecontee, sixty 
pounds of from two to three and a half pounds each. There is 
also fine fishing in Belgrade ponds, Pushaw pond, Bangor, and 
in scores of others. I mention these as they are easy of access 
