NATURE'S REALM. 195 
put them back into the water, but invariably 
their final end has been to climb out at night 
and die before I found them the next morning. 
The last eel I had (thirty inches long and two 
and a half pounds in weight), was probably 
cured ot his roving propensities by being very 
near the point of death several times before he 
was found and restored to the water, for he re- 
mained in the tank an entire year without 
climbing out. 
One Sunday evening last August I happened 
to come to the store, and I found quite a crowd 
collected in front. One of my old pet bass had 
jumped out and died, lying between the tank 
and the window. I could not understand it— 
the bass ought to have known better. The 
next morning my eel was on the floor, dead. 
‘ omething was surely wrong, and on investi- 
gation I found that a large snapping turtle, 
which I had temporarily put into the back tank 
until I was ready to eat him, had managed to 
climb over into the main tank. How he suc- 
ceeded I can’t imagine, but I could hardly 
blame the bass and the eel for wanting to avoid 
the company of the ugly intruder. You may 
rest assured that I promptly put the big snap- 
per into an iron cage until I was ready to kill 
him. This summer I intend to make one more 
attempt to keep an eel. 
Last September the owner of a private pond 
presented me with a carp weighing seven 
pounds. I put it into the tank, but the brute 
was sighing for its native mud and would not 
be contented. It was too clumsy to climb out, 
but managed to throw water ten feet high, and 
in less than forty-eight hours it had pounded 
its tail fin into shreds, knocked most of the 
skin from the top of its head, and had the gen- 
eral appearance of having been run through a 
threshing machine. It went from the tank into 
the bake oven. 
During these four years of feeding my fish, I 
have of course paid some attention to their pre- 
ferences in food, and their manner of taking it. 
For bass, minnows are undoubtedly the 
great staple food, and of these the larger are 
preferred to the smaller. Whenever I give 
them a lot of minnows of various sizes, from 
two to five inches long, they always pick out 
the largest ones first, and take the smaller ones 
only after no larger ones are left. Black bass, 
rock bass and channel catfish will eat crawfish, 
but they prefer minnows. I have often found 
my fish eager after minnows when they ignored 
crawfish. One day last summer, when my fish 
had been without food for several days, I 
brought from the river a six-quart minnow 
bucket filled solid (without water) with craw- 
fish, and another bucket filled with minnows. 
I set the bucket with the minnows into the back 
tank, and dumped the crawfish into the main 
tank.. The bass immediately commenced to 
feed, but after twenty minutes they had quit 
entirely, and the bottom of the tank was still 
swarming with crawfish. I then emptied in 
the bucketful of minnows (more than a hundred 
shiners, two or three inches long), and the fish 
immediately commenced to feed again, making 
the water fairly boil. Five minutes afterward 
they had taken all of the minnows, and their 
bellies were a sight; bass, goggle-eyes and 
channel catfish, all were stuffed till it seemed 
their skins would burst. 
All of my fish enjoy a few worms occasion- 
ally, and during the summer I sometimes catch 
a lot of grasshoppers, which are always taken 
quickly by the bass and goggle-eyes. 
Last summer some workmen, digging under 
a coal house in the rear of my store, caught 
some mice, which I induced them to bring in 
and throw to my fish. Five of the mice were 
alive and kicking, and, as soon as they struck 
the water, each were promptly caught by a 
bass and swallowed. The sixth mouse had 
been killed in the catching, but before it had 
stopped the motion caused from throwing it, a 
bass had it. The fish held the dead mouse 
only a second or two, when he spit, it out, and 
it floated lifeless on the surface; none of the 
fish would or did eat it. A boy once brought 
me a live sparrow, full-feathered and nearly 
full-grown, which I threw into the tank. The 
bird was struggling in the water, and within 
five seconds from the time it was thrown in, 
one of the large bass caught it—and he swal- 
lowed it, too. The sparrow was a big mouth- 
ful for the bass, but slowly and gradually I saw 
the tail feathers disappear, and finally I could 
see a large lump in the body of the fish. 
The capacity of the stomach of a fish is won- 
