THE GAME BREEDER. 



73 



The Club House. 



THE LONGWOOD VALLEY SPORTSMEN'S CLUB. 



Kenneth F. Lockwood. 



Tourist and summer resort literati 

 long ago made trite the most delectable 

 adjectives in our vocabulary — a most un- 

 fortunate fact when one sets out to de- 

 scribe such an enterprise as is the sub- 

 ject of this narrative. There may have 

 been a day when the public was willing 

 to believe that beautiful meant beauti- 

 ful and that wonderful meant just that 

 and so on, but the reckless abandon with 

 which these words have been seized 

 upon and dragged into type has multi- 

 plied the population of Missouri beyond 

 all reason. 



Now, skepticism is a terrible affliction. 

 It ossifies and petrifies the mind and the 

 heart. The original bonehead was sim- 

 ply a skeptic — not a dunce at all. Oddly 



enough the ossification process does not 

 affect the eye. Thus the most efficient 

 way to treat a victim is to take him by 

 the hand and gently "lead him to it." 

 Which is what happened in the case of 

 the writer. True, he was not exactly a 

 skeptic, nor did he claim Missouri as his 

 official residence, but he had read an aw- 

 ful number of railroad and resort book- 

 lets — about places he had visited. Let 

 us say, as they do in Washington these 

 days, that his mind was open on the sub- 

 ject. 



It is no mean distance from near- 

 skepticism or open-mindedness to enthu- 

 siastic, partisan conviction, yet in the 

 case of the writer it was covered in a 

 single step. That was when one fine day 



